Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Bleak House
by
Charles Dickens
PREFACE
A Chancery judge once had the kindness to inform me, as one of a
company of some hundred and fifty men and women not labouring
under any suspicions of lunacy, that the Court of Chancery, though the
shining subject of much popular prejudice (at which point I thought the
judge’s eye had a cast in my direction), was almost immaculate. There
had been, he admitted, a trivial blemish or so in its rate of progress, but
this was exaggerated and had been entirely owing to the “parsimony of
the public,” which guilty public, it appeared, had been until lately bent
in the most determined manner on by no means enlarging the number
of Chancery judges appointed—I believe by Richard the Second, but
any other king will do as well.
This seemed to me too profound a joke to be inserted in the body of
this book or I should have restored it to Conversation Kenge or to Mr.
Vholes, with one or other of whom I think it must have originated. In
such mouths I might have coupled it with an apt quotation from one of
Shakespeare’s sonnets:
“My nature is subdued
To what it works in, like the dyer’s hand:
Pity me, then, and wish I were renewed!”
But as it is wholesome that the parsimonious public should know
what has been doing, and still is doing, in this connexion, I mention
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here that everything set forth in these pages concerning the Court of
Chancery is substantially true, and within the truth. The case of
Gridley is in no essential altered from one of actual occurrence, made
public by a disinterested person who was professionally acquainted
with the whole of the monstrous wrong from beginning to end. At
the present moment (August, 1853) there is a suit before the court
which was commenced nearly twenty years ago, in which from thirty
to forty counsel have been known to appear at one time, in which
costs have been incurred to the amount of seventy thousand pounds,
which is a friendly suit, and which is (I am assured) no nearer to its
termination now than when it was begun. There is another well-
known suit in Chancery, not yet decided, which was commenced
before the close of the last century and in which more than double
the amount of seventy thousand pounds has been swallowed up in
costs. If I wanted other authorities for Jarndyce and Jarndyce, I could
rain them on these pages, to the shame of—a parsimonious public.
There is only one other point on which I offer a word of remark.
The possibility of what is called spontaneous combustion has been
denied since the death of Mr. Krook; and my good friend Mr. Lewes
(quite mistaken, as he soon found, in supposing the thing to have
been abandoned by all authorities) published some ingenious letters
to me at the time when that event was chronicled, arguing that spon-
taneous combustion could not possibly be. I have no need to observe
that I do not wilfully or negligently mislead my readers and that
before I wrote that description I took pains to investigate the subject.
There are about thirty cases on record, of which the most famous,
that of the Countess Cornelia de Baudi Cesenate, was minutely in-
vestigated and described by Giuseppe Bianchini, a prebendary of
Verona, otherwise distinguished in letters, who published an account
of it at Verona in 1731, which he afterwards republished at Rome.
The appearances, beyond all rational doubt, observed in that case are
the appearances observed in Mr. Krook’s case. The next most famous
instance happened at Rheims six years earlier, and the historian in
that case is Le Cat, one of the most renowned surgeons produced by
France. The subject was a woman, whose husband was ignorantly
convicted of having murdered her; but on solemn appeal to a higher
court, he was acquitted because it was shown upon the evidence that
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she had died the death of which this name of spontaneous combus-
tion is given. I do not think it necessary to add to these notable facts,
and that general reference to the authorities which will be found at
page 30, vol. ii.,* the recorded opinions and experiences of distin-
guished medical professors, French, English, and Scotch, in more
modern days, contenting myself with observing that I shall not aban-
don the facts until there shall have been a considerable spontaneous
combustion of the testimony on which human occurrences are usu-
ally received.
In Bleak House I have purposely dwelt upon the romantic side of
familiar things.
1853
* Another case, very clearly described by a dentist, occurred at the town of Colum-
bus, in the United States of America, quite recently. The subject was a German who
kept a liquor- shop aud was an inveterate drunkard.
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CHAPTER I
In Chancery
LONDON. MICHAELMAS TERM lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting
in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in
the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the
earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet
long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke
lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with
flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourn-
ing, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable
in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot
passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill
temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thou-
sands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the
day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon
crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and
accumulating at compound interest.
Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green
aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls deified among
the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and
dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights.
Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the
yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on
the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats
of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their
wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful
skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and
fingers of his shivering little ‘prentice boy on deck. Chance people
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on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog,
with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hang-
ing in the misty clouds.
Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets, much
as the sun may, from the spongey fields, be seen to loom by hus-
bandman and ploughboy. Most of the shops lighted two hours be-
fore their time—as the gas seems to know, for it has a haggard and
unwilling look.
The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the
muddy streets are muddiest near that leaden-headed old obstruction,
appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old cor-
poration, Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln’s Inn
Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in
his High Court of Chancery.
Never can there come fog too thick, never can there come mud
and mire too deep, to assort with the groping and floundering con-
dition which this High Court of Chancery, most pestilent of hoary
sinners, holds this day in the sight of heaven and earth.
On such an afternoon, if ever, the Lord High Chancellor ought to
be sitting her—as here he is—with a foggy glory round his head,
softly fenced in with crimson cloth and curtains, addressed by a large
advocate with great whiskers, a little voice, and an interminable brief,
and outwardly directing his contemplation to the lantern in the roof,
where he can see nothing but fog. On such an afternoon some score
of members of the High Court of Chancery bar ought to be—as
here they are—mistily engaged in one of the ten thousand stages of
an endless cause, tripping one another up on slippery precedents,
groping knee- deep in technicalities, running their goat-hair and horse-
hair warded heads against walls of words and making a pretence of
equity with serious faces, as players might. On such an afternoon the
various solicitors in the cause, some two or three of whom have
inherited it from their fathers, who made a fortune by it, ought to
be—as are they not?—ranged in a line, in a long matted well (but
you might look in vain for truth at the bottom of it) between the
registrar’s red table and the silk gowns, with bills, cross-bills, an-
swers, rejoinders, injunctions, affidavits, issues, references to masters,
masters’ reports, mountains of costly nonsense, piled before them.
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Well may the court be dim, with wasting candles here and there; well
may the fog hang heavy in it, as if it would never get out; well may
the stained-glass windows lose their colour and admit no light of day
into the place; well may the uninitiated from the streets, who peep in
through the glass panes in the door, be deterred from entrance by its
owlish aspect and by the drawl, languidly echoing to the roof from
the padded dais where the Lord High Chancellor looks into the lan-
tern that has no light in it and where the attendant wigs are all stuck
in a fog-bank! This is the Court of Chancery, which has its decaying
houses and its blighted lands in every shire, which has its worn-out
lunatic in every madhouse and its dead in every churchyard, which
has its ruined suitor with his slipshod heels and threadbare dress bor-
rowing and begging through the round of every man’s acquaintance,
which gives to monied might the means abundantly of wearying out
the right, which so exhausts finances, patience, courage, hope, so
overthrows the brain and breaks the heart, that there is not an
honourable man among its practitioners who would not give—who
does not often give—the warning, “Suffer any wrong that can be
done you rather than come here!”
Who happen to be in the Lord Chancellor’s court this murky af-
ternoon besides the Lord Chancellor, the counsel in the cause, two or
three counsel who are never in any cause, and the well of solicitors
before mentioned? There is the registrar below the judge, in wig and
gown; and there are two or three maces, or petty-bags, or privy purses,
or whatever they may be, in legal court suits. These are all yawning,
for no crumb of amusement ever falls from Jarndyce and Jarndyce
(the cause in hand), which was squeezed dry years upon years ago.
The short-hand writers, the reporters of the court, and the reporters
of the newspapers invariably decamp with the rest of the regulars
when Jarndyce and Jarndyce comes on. Their places are a blank. Stand-
ing on a seat at the side of the hall, the better to peer into the cur-
tained sanctuary, is a little mad old woman in a squeezed bonnet
who is always in court, from its sitting to its rising, and always ex-
pecting some incomprehensible judgment to be given in her favour.
Some say she really is, or was, a party to a suit, but no one knows for
certain because no one cares. She carries some small litter in a reticule
which she calls her documents, principally consisting of paper matches
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and dry lavender. A sallow prisoner has come up, in custody, for the
half-dozenth time to make a personal application “to purge himself
of his contempt,” which, being a solitary surviving executor who has
fallen into a state of conglomeration about accounts of which it is
not pretended that he had ever any knowledge, he is not at all likely
ever to do. In the meantime his prospects in life are ended. Another
ruined suitor, who periodically appears from Shropshire and breaks
out into efforts to address the Chancellor at the close of the day’s
business and who can by no means be made to understand that the
Chancellor is legally ignorant of his existence after making it desolate
for a quarter of a century, plants himself in a good place and keeps an
eye on the judge, ready to call out “My Lord!” in a voice of sonorous
complaint on the instant of his rising. A few lawyers’ clerks and oth-
ers who know this suitor by sight linger on the chance of his furnish-
ing some fun and enlivening the dismal weather a little.
Jarndyce and Jarndyce drones on. This scarecrow of a suit has, in
course of time, become so complicated that no man alive knows
what it means. The parties to it understand it least, but it has been
observed that no two Chancery lawyers can talk about it for five
minutes without coming to a total disagreement as to all the pre-
mises. Innumerable children have been born into the cause; innu-
merable young people have married into it; innumerable old people
have died out of it. Scores of persons have deliriously found them-
selves made parties in Jarndyce and Jarndyce without knowing how
or why; whole families have inherited legendary hatreds with the
suit. The little plaintiff or defendant who was promised a new rock-
ing-horse when Jarndyce and Jarndyce should be settled has grown up,
possessed himself of a real horse, and trotted away into the other world.
Fair wards of court have faded into mothers and grandmothers; a long
procession of Chancellors has come in and gone out; the legion of bills
in the suit have been transformed into mere bills of mortality; there are
not three Jarndyces left upon the earth perhaps since old Tom Jarndyce
in despair blew his brains out at a coffee-house in Chancery Lane; but
Jarndyce and Jarndyce still drags its dreary length before the court,
perennially hopeless.
Jarndyce and Jarndyce has passed into a joke. That is the only good
that has ever come of it. It has been death to many, but it is a joke in
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CHAPTER II
In Fashion
IT IS BUT A GLIMPSE of the world of fashion that we want on this same
miry afternoon. It is not so unlike the Court of Chancery but that
we may pass from the one scene to the other, as the crow flies. Both
the world of fashion and the Court of Chancery are things of prece-
dent and usage: oversleeping Rip Van Winkles who have played at
strange games through a deal of thundery weather; sleeping beauties
whom the knight will wake one day, when all the stopped spits in
the kitchen shall begin to turn prodigiously!
It is not a large world. Relatively even to this world of ours, which
has its limits too (as your Highness shall find when you have made
the tour of it and are come to the brink of the void beyond), it is a
very little speck. There is much good in it; there are many good and
true people in it; it has its appointed place. But the evil of it is that it
is a world wrapped up in too much jeweller’s cotton and fine wool,
and cannot hear the rushing of the larger worlds, and cannot see
them as they circle round the sun. It is a deadened world, and its
growth is sometimes unhealthy for want of air.
My Lady Dedlock has returned to her house in town for a few
days previous to her departure for Paris, where her ladyship intends
to stay some weeks, after which her movements are uncertain. The
fashionable intelligence says so for the comfort of the Parisians, and
it knows all fashionable things. To know things otherwise were to be
unfashionable. My Lady Dedlock has been down at what she calls, in
familiar conversation, her “place” in Lincolnshire. The waters are out
in Lincolnshire. An arch of the bridge in the park has been sapped
and sopped away. The adjacent low-lying ground for half a mile in
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when not enclosed with a park- fence), but an idea dependent for its
execution on your great county families. He is a gentleman of strict
conscience, disdainful of all littleness and meanness and ready on the
shortest notice to die any death you may please to mention rather
than give occasion for the least impeachment of his integrity. He is
an honourable, obstinate, truthful, high- spirited, intensely preju-
diced, perfectly unreasonable man.
Sir Leicester is twenty years, full measure, older than my Lady. He
will never see sixty-five again, nor perhaps sixty-six, nor yet sixty-
seven. He has a twist of the gout now and then and walks a little
stiffly. He is of a worthy presence, with his light-grey hair and whis-
kers, his fine shirt-frill, his pure-white waistcoat, and his blue coat
with bright buttons always buttoned. He is ceremonious, stately,
most polite on every occasion to my Lady, and holds her personal
attractions in the highest estimation. His gallantry to my Lady, which
has never changed since he courted her, is the one little touch of
romantic fancy in him.
Indeed, he married her for love. A whisper still goes about that she had
not even family; howbeit, Sir Leicester had so much family that perhaps
he had enough and could dispense with any more. But she had beauty,
pride, ambition, insolent resolve, and sense enough to portion out a
legion of fine ladies. Wealth and station, added to these, soon floated her
upward, and for years now my Lady Dedlock has been at the centre of
the fashionable intelligence and at the top of the fashionable tree.
How Alexander wept when he had no more worlds to conquer,
everybody Knows—or has some reason to know by this time, the
matter having been rather frequently mentioned. My Lady Dedlock,
having conquered her world, fell not into the melting, but rather
into the freezing, mood. An exhausted composure, a worn-out pla-
cidity, an equanimity of fatigue not to be ruffled by interest or satis-
faction, are the trophies of her victory. She is perfectly well-bred. If
she could be translated to heaven to-morrow, she might be expected
to ascend without any rapture.
She has beauty still, and if it be not in its heyday, it is not yet in its
autumn. She has a fine face—originally of a character that would be
rather called very pretty than handsome, but improved into classicality
by the acquired expression of her fashionable state. Her figure is elegant
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and has the effect of being tall. Not that she is so, but that “the most is
made,” as the Honourable Bob Stables has frequently asserted upon
oath, “of all her points.” The same authority observes that she is perfectly
got up and remarks in commendation of her hair especially that she is
the best-groomed woman in the whole stud.
With all her perfections on her head, my Lady Dedlock has come
up from her place in Lincolnshire (hotly pursued by the fashionable
intelligence) to pass a few days at her house in town previous to her
departure for Paris, where her ladyship intends to stay some weeks,
after which her movements are uncertain. And at her house in town,
upon this muddy, murky afternoon, presents himself an old-fash-
ioned old gentleman, attorney-at-law and eke solicitor of the High
Court of Chancery, who has the honour of acting as legal adviser of
the Dedlocks and has as many cast-iron boxes in his office with that
name outside as if the present baronet were the coin of the conjuror’s
trick and were constantly being juggled through the whole set. Across
the hall, and up the stairs, and along the passages, and through the
rooms, which are very brilliant in the season and very dismal out of
it—fairy- land to visit, but a desert to live in—the old gentleman is
conducted by a Mercury in powder to my Lady’s presence.
The old gentleman is rusty to look at, but is reputed to have made
good thrift out of aristocratic marriage settlements and aristocratic
wills, and to be very rich. He is surrounded by a mysterious halo of
family confidences, of which he is known to be the silent depository.
There are noble mausoleums rooted for centuries in retired glades of
parks among the growing timber and the fern, which perhaps hold
fewer noble secrets than walk abroad among men, shut up in the
breast of Mr. Tulkinghorn. He is of what is called the old school—a
phrase generally meaning any school that seems never to have been
young—and wears knee-breeches tied with ribbons, and gaiters or
stockings. One peculiarity of his black clothes and of his black stock-
ings, be they silk or worsted, is that they never shine. Mute, close,
irresponsive to any glancing light, his dress is like himself. He never
converses when not professionaly consulted. He is found sometimes,
speechless but quite at home, at corners of dinner-tables in great coun-
try houses and near doors of drawing-rooms, concerning which the
fashionable intelligence is eloquent, where everybody knows him and
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where half the Peerage stops to say “How do you do, Mr.
Tulkinghorn?” He receives these salutations with gravity and buries
them along with the rest of his knowledge.
Sir Leicester Dedlock is with my Lady and is happy to see Mr.
Tulkinghorn. There is an air of prescription about him which is al-
ways agreeable to Sir Leicester; he receives it as a kind of tribute. He
likes Mr. Tulkinghorn’s dress; there is a kind of tribute in that too. It
is eminently respectable, and likewise, in a general way, retainer-like.
It expresses, as it were, the steward of the legal mysteries, the butler
of the legal cellar, of the Dedlocks.
Has Mr. Tulkinghorn any idea of this himself? It may be so, or it
may not, but there is this remarkable circumstance to be noted in
everything associated with my Lady Dedlock as one of a class—as
one of the leaders and representatives of her little world. She sup-
poses herself to be an inscrutable Being, quite out of the reach and
ken of ordinary mortals—seeing herself in her glass, where indeed
she looks so. Yet every dim little star revolving about her, from her
maid to the manager of the Italian Opera, knows her weaknesses,
prejudices, follies, haughtinesses, and caprices and lives upon as accu-
rate a calculation and as nice a measure of her moral nature as her
dressmaker takes of her physical proportions. Is a new dress, a new
custom, a new singer, a new dancer, a new form of jewellery, a new
dwarf or giant, a new chapel, a new anything, to be set up? There are
deferential people in a dozen callings whom my Lady Dedlock sus-
pects of nothing but prostration before her, who can tell you how to
manage her as if she were a baby, who do nothing but nurse her all
their lives, who, humbly affecting to follow with profound subservi-
ence, lead her and her whole troop after them; who, in hooking one,
hook all and bear them off as Lemuel Gulliver bore away the stately
fleet of the majestic Lilliput. “If you want to address our people, sir,”
say Blaze and Sparkle, the jewellers—meaning by our people Lady
Dedlock and the Rest—”you must remember that you are not deal-
ing with the general public; you must hit our people in their weakest
place, and their weakest place is such a place.” “To make this article
go down, gentlemen,” say Sheen and Gloss, the mercers, to their
friends the manufacturers, “you must come to us, because we know
where to have the fashionable people, and we can make it fashion-
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able.” “If you want to get this print upon the tables of my high
connexion, sir,” says Mr. Sladdery, the librarian, “or if you want to
get this dwarf or giant into the houses of my high connexion, sir, or
if you want to secure to this entertainment the patronage of my high
connexion, sir, you must leave it, if you please, to me, for I have been
accustomed to study the leaders of my high connexion, sir, and I
may tell you without vanity that I can turn them round my fin-
ger”—in which Mr. Sladdery, who is an honest man, does not exag-
gerate at all.
Therefore, while Mr. Tulkinghorn may not know what is passing
in the Dedlock mind at present, it is very possible that he may.
“My Lady’s cause has been again before the Chancellor, has it, Mr.
Tulkinghorn?” says Sir Leicester, giving him his hand.
“Yes. It has been on again to-day,” Mr. Tulkinghorn replies, mak-
ing one of his quiet bows to my Lady, who is on a sofa near the fire,
shading her face with a hand-screen.
“It would be useless to ask,” says my Lady with the dreariness of
the place in Lincolnshire still upon her, “whether anything has been
done.”
“Nothing that you would call anything has been done to-day,” re-
plies Mr. Tulkinghorn.
“Nor ever will be,” says my Lady.
Sir Leicester has no objection to an interminable Chancery suit. It is a
slow, expensive, British, constitutional kind of thing. To be sure, he has
not a vital interest in the suit in question, her part in which was the only
property my Lady brought him; and he has a shadowy impression that
for his name—the name of Dedlock—to be in a cause, and not in the
title of that cause, is a most ridiculous accident. But he regards the Court
of Chancery, even if it should involve an occasional delay of justice and a
trifling amount of confusion, as a something devised in conjunction
with a variety of other somethings by the perfection of human wisdom
for the eternal settlement (humanly speaking) of everything. And he is
upon the whole of a fixed opinion that to give the sanction of his coun-
tenance to any complaints respecting it would be to encourage some
person in the lower classes to rise up somewhere—like Wat Tyler.
“As a few fresh affidavits have been put upon the file,” says Mr.
Tulkinghorn, “and as they are short, and as I proceed upon the trouble-
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CHAPTER III
A Progress
I HAVE A GREAT DEAL of difficulty in beginning to write my portion of
these pages, for I know I am not clever. I always knew that. I can
remember, when I was a very little girl indeed, I used to say to my
doll when we were alone together, “Now, Dolly, I am not clever, you
know very well, and you must be patient with me, like a dear!” And
so she used to sit propped up in a great arm-chair, with her beautiful
complexion and rosy lips, staring at me—or not so much at me, I
think, as at nothing—while I busily stitched away and told her every
one of my secrets.
My dear old doll! I was such a shy little thing that I seldom dared
to open my lips, and never dared to open my heart, to anybody else.
It almost makes me cry to think what a relief it used to be to me
when I came home from school of a day to run upstairs to my room
and say, “Oh, you dear faithful Dolly, I knew you would be expect-
ing me!” and then to sit down on the floor, leaning on the elbow of
her great chair, and tell her all I had noticed since we parted. I had
always rather a noticing way—not a quick way, oh, no!—a silent
way of noticing what passed before me and thinking I should like to
understand it better. I have not by any means a quick understanding.
When I love a person very tenderly indeed, it seems to brighten. But
even that may be my vanity.
I was brought up, from my earliest remembrance—like some of
the princesses in the fairy stories, only I was not charming—by my
godmother. At least, I only knew her as such. She was a good, good
woman! She went to church three times every Sunday, and to morn-
ing prayers on Wednesdays and Fridays, and to lectures whenever
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there were lectures; and never missed. She was handsome; and if she
had ever smiled, would have been (I used to think) like an angel—
but she never smiled. She was always grave and strict. She was so very
good herself, I thought, that the badness of other people made her
frown all her life. I felt so different from her, even making every
allowance for the differences between a child and a woman; I felt so
poor, so trifling, and so far off that I never could be unrestrained
with her—no, could never even love her as I wished. It made me very
sorry to consider how good she was and how unworthy of her I was,
and I used ardently to hope that I might have a better heart; and I
talked it over very often with the dear old doll, but I never loved my
godmother as I ought to have loved her and as I felt I must have
loved her if I had been a better girl.
This made me, I dare say, more timid and retiring than I naturally
was and cast me upon Dolly as the only friend with whom I felt at
ease. But something happened when I was still quite a little thing
that helped it very much.
I had never heard my mama spoken of. I had never heard of my
papa either, but I felt more interested about my mama. I had never
worn a black frock, that I could recollect. I had never been shown
my mama’s grave. I had never been told where it was. Yet I had never
been taught to pray for any relation but my godmother. I had more
than once approached this subject of my thoughts with Mrs. Rachael,
our only servant, who took my light away when I was in bed (an-
other very good woman, but austere to me), and she had only said,
“Esther, good night!” and gone away and left me.
Although there were seven girls at the neighbouring school where
I was a day boarder, and although they called me little Esther
Summerson, I knew none of them at home. All of them were older
than I, to be sure (I was the youngest there by a good deal), but there
seemed to be some other separation between us besides that, and
besides their being far more clever than I was and knowing much
more than I did. One of them in the first week of my going to the
school (I remember it very well) invited me home to a little party, to
my great joy. But my godmother wrote a stiff letter declining for
me, and I never went. I never went out at all.
It was my birthday. There were holidays at school on other Birth-
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say no more of it, though it was greater than you will ever know—
than any one will ever know but I, the sufferer. For yourself, unfor-
tunate girl, orphaned and degraded from the first of these evil anni-
versaries, pray daily that the sins of others be not visited upon your
head, according to what is written. Forget your mother and leave all
other people to forget her who will do her unhappy child that great-
est kindness. Now, go!”
She checked me, however, as I was about to depart from her—so
frozen as I was!—and added this, “Submission, self-denial, diligent
work, are the preparations for a life begun with such a shadow on it.
You are different from other children, Esther, because you were not
born, like them, in common sinfulness and wrath. You are set apart.”
I went up to my room, and crept to bed, and laid my doll’s cheek
against mine wet with tears, and holding that solitary friend upon
my bosom, cried myself to sleep. Imperfect as my understanding of
my sorrow was, I knew that I had brought no joy at any time to
anybody’s heart and that I was to no one upon earth what Dolly was
to me.
Dear, dear, to think how much time we passed alone together after-
wards, and how often I repeated to the doll the story of my birthday
and confided to her that I would try as hard as ever I could to repair the
fault I had been born with (of which I confessedly felt guilty and yet
innocent) and would strive as I grew up to be industrious, contented,
and kind- hearted and to do some good to some one, and win some
love to myself if I could. I hope it is not self-indulgent to shed these
tears as I think of it. I am very thankful, I am very cheerful, but I
cannot quite help their coming to my eyes.
There! I have wiped them away now and can go on again properly.
I felt the distance between my godmother and myself so much more
after the birthday, and felt so sensible of filling a place in her house which
ought to have been empty, that I found her more difficult of approach,
though I was fervently grateful to her in my heart, than ever. I felt in the
same way towards my school companions; I felt in the same way to-
wards Mrs. Rachael, who was a widow; and oh, towards her daughter, of
whom she was proud, who came to see her once a fortnight! I was very
retired and quiet, and tried to be very diligent.
One sunny afternoon when I had come home from school with
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plainer to her, I kissed her, thanked her, prayed for her, asked her for her
blessing and forgiveness, entreated her to give me the least sign that she
knew or heard me. No, no, no. Her face was immovable. To the very last,
and even afterwards, her frown remained unsoftened.
On the day after my poor good godmother was buried, the gentle-
man in black with the white neckcloth reappeared. I was sent for by
Mrs. Rachael, and found him in the same place, as if he had never
gone away.
“My name is Kenge,” he said; “you may remember it, my child;
Kenge and Carboy, Lincoln’s Inn.”
I replied that I remembered to have seen him once before.
“Pray be seated—here near me. Don’t distress yourself; it’s of no use.
Mrs. Rachael, I needn’t inform you who were acquainted with the late
Miss Barbary’s affairs, that her means die with her and that this young
lady, now her aunt is dead—”
“My aunt, sir!”
“It is really of no use carrying on a deception when no object is to
be gained by it,” said Mr. Kenge smoothly, “Aunt in fact, though not
in law. Don’t distress yourself! Don’t weep! Don’t tremble! Mrs.
Rachael, our young friend has no doubt heard of—the—a—Jarndyce
and Jarndyce.”
“Never,” said Mrs. Rachael.
“Is it possible,” pursued Mr. Kenge, putting up his eye-glasses, “that
our young friend—I beg you won’t distress yourself!—never heard of
Jarndyce and Jarndyce!”
I shook my head, wondering even what it was.
“Not of Jarndyce and Jarndyce?” said Mr. Kenge, looking over his glasses
at me and softly turning the case about and about as if he were petting
something. “Not of one of the greatest Chancery suits known? Not of Jarndyce
and Jarndyce—the—a—in itself a monument of Chancery practice. In which
(I would say) every difficulty, every contingency, every masterly fiction, every
form of procedure known in that court, is represented over and over again? It
is a cause that could not exist out of this free and great country. I should say
that the aggregate of costs in Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Mrs. Rachael”—I was
afraid he addressed himself to her because I appeared inattentive”—amounts
at the present hour to from six-ty to seven-ty thousand pounds!” said Mr.
Kenge, leaning back in his chair.
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I felt very ignorant, but what could I do? I was so entirely unac-
quainted with the subject that I understood nothing about it even
then.
“And she really never heard of the cause!” said Mr. Kenge. “Sur-
prising!”
“Miss Barbary, sir,” returned Mrs. Rachael, “who is now among
the Seraphim—”
“I hope so, I am sure,” said Mr. Kenge politely.
“—Wished Esther only to know what would be serviceable to her.
And she knows, from any teaching she has had here, nothing more.”
“Well!” said Mr. Kenge. “Upon the whole, very proper. Now to
the point,” addressing me. “Miss Barbary, your sole relation (in fact
that is, for I am bound to observe that in law you had none) being
deceased and it naturally not being to be expected that Mrs. Rachael—
”
“Oh, dear no!” said Mrs. Rachael quickly.
“Quite so,” assented Mr. Kenge; “—that Mrs. Rachael should charge
herself with your maintenance and support (I beg you won’t distress
yourself), you are in a position to receive the renewal of an offer which I
was instructed to make to Miss Barbary some two years ago and which,
though rejected then, was understood to be renewable under the lamen-
table circumstances that have since occurred. Now, if I avow that I repre-
sent, in Jarndyce and Jarndyce and otherwise, a highly humane, but at
the same time singular, man, shall I compromise myself by any stretch of
my professional caution?” said Mr. Kenge, leaning back in his chair again
and looking calmly at us both.
He appeared to enjoy beyond everything the sound of his own
voice. I couldn’t wonder at that, for it was mellow and full and gave
great importance to every word he uttered. He listened to himself
with obvious satisfaction and sometimes gently beat time to his own
music with his head or rounded a sentence with his hand. I was very
much impressed by him—even then, before I knew that he formed
himself on the model of a great lord who was his client and that he
was generally called Conversation Kenge.
“Mr. Jarndyce,” he pursued, “being aware of the—I would say, deso-
late—position of our young friend, offers to place her at a first-rate es-
tablishment where her education shall be completed, where her comfort
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thing in the world I had ever seen, was hanging outside in the frost
and snow. A day or two before, I had wrapped the dear old doll in
her own shawl and quietly laid her—I am half ashamed to tell it—in
the garden-earth under the tree that shaded my old window. I had no
companion left but my bird, and him I carried with me in his cage.
When the house was out of sight, I sat, with my bird-cage in the
straw at my feet, forward on the low seat to look out of the high
window, watching the frosty trees, that were like beautiful pieces of
spar, and the fields all smooth and white with last night’s snow, and
the sun, so red but yielding so little heat, and the ice, dark like metal
where the skaters and sliders had brushed the snow away. There was
a gentleman in the coach who sat on the opposite seat and looked
very large in a quantity of wrappings, but he sat gazing out of the
other window and took no notice of me.
I thought of my dead godmother, of the night when I read to her,
of her frowning so fixedly and sternly in her bed, of the strange place
I was going to, of the people I should find there, and what they
would be like, and what they would say to me, when a voice in the
coach gave me a terrible start.
It said, “What the de-vil are you crying for?”
I was so frightened that I lost my voice and could only answer in a
whisper, “Me, sir?” For of course I knew it must have been the gentle-
man in the quantity of wrappings, though he was still looking out of
his window.
“Yes, you,” he said, turning round.
“I didn’t know I was crying, sir,” I faltered.
“But you are!” said the gentleman. “Look here!” He came quite
opposite to me from the other corner of the coach, brushed one of
his large furry cuffs across my eyes (but without hurting me), and
showed me that it was wet.
“There! Now you know you are,” he said. “Don’t you?”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“And what are you crying for?” said the genfleman, “Don’t you
want to go there?”
“Where, sir?”
“Where? Why, wherever you are going,” said the gentleman.
“I am very glad to go there, sir,” I answered.
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time I had plenty to do, which I was very fond of doing because it
made the dear girls fond of me. At last, whenever a new pupil came
who was a little downcast and unhappy, she was so sure—indeed I
don’t know why—to make a friend of me that all new-comers were
confided to my care. They said I was so gentle, but I am sure they were!
I often thought of the resolution I had made on my birthday to try to
be industrious, contented, and true-hearted and to do some good to
some one and win some love if I could; and indeed, indeed, I felt
almost ashamed to have done so little and have won so much.
I passed at Greenleaf six happy, quiet years. I never saw in any face there,
thank heaven, on my birthday, that it would have been better if I had never
been born. When the day came round, it brought me so many tokens of
affectionate remembrance that my room was beautiful with them from
New Year’s Day to Christmas.
In those six years I had never been away except on visits at holiday
time in the neighbourhood. After the first six months or so I had
taken Miss Donny’s advice in reference to the propriety of writing to
Mr. Kenge to say that I was happy and grateful, and with her ap-
proval I had written such a letter. I had received a formal answer
acknowledging its receipt and saying, “We note the contents thereof,
which shall be duly communicated to our client.” After that I some-
times heard Miss Donny and her sister mention how regular my
accounts were paid, and about twice a year I ventured to write a
similar letter. I always received by return of post exactly the same
answer in the same round hand, with the signature of Kenge and
Carboy in another writing, which I supposed to be Mr. Kenge’s.
It seems so curious to me to be obliged to write all this about my-
self! As if this narrative were the narrative of my life! But my little body
will soon fall into the background now.
Six quiet years (I find I am saying it for the second time) I had
passed at Greenleaf, seeing in those around me, as it might be in a
looking-glass, every stage of my own growth and change there, when,
one November morning, I received this letter. I omit the date.
Old Square, Lincoln’s Inn
Madam,
Jarndyce and Jarndyce
Our clt Mr. Jarndyce being abt to rece into his house, under an
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OH, NEVER, NEVER, NEVER shall I forget the emotion this letter caused
in the house! It was so tender in them to care so much for me, it was
so gracious in that father who had not forgotten me to have made
my orphan way so smooth and easy and to have inclined so many
youthful natures towards me, that I could hardly bear it. Not that I
would have had them less sorry—I am afraid not; but the pleasure of
it, and the pain of it, and the pride and joy of it, and the humble
regret of it were so blended that my heart seemed almost breaking
while it was full of rapture.
The letter gave me only five days’ notice of my removal. When
every minute added to the proofs of love and kindness that were given
me in those five days, and when at last the morning came and when
they took me through all the rooms that I might see them for the last
time, and when some cried, “Esther, dear, say good-bye to me here at
my bedside, where you first spoke so kindly to me!” and when others
asked me only to write their names, “With Esther’s love,” and when
they all surrounded me with their parting presents and clung to me
weeping and cried, “What shall we do when dear, dear Esther’s gone!”
and when I tried to tell them how forbearing and how good they had
all been to me and how I blessed and thanked them every one, what a
heart I had!
And when the two Miss Donnys grieved as much to part with me as
the least among them, and when the maids said, “Bless you, miss, wher-
ever you go!” and when the ugly lame old gardener, who I thought had
hardly noticed me in all those years, came panting after the coach to give
me a little nosegay of geraniums and told me I had been the light of his
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passed into sudden quietude under an old gateway and drove on through
a silent square until we came to an odd nook in a corner, where there
was an entrance up a steep, broad flight of stairs, like an entrance to a
church. And there really was a churchyard outside under some clois-
ters, for I saw the gravestones from the staircase window.
This was Kenge and Carboy’s. The young gentleman showed me
through an outer office into Mr. Kenge’s room—there was no one in
it—and politely put an arm-chair for me by the fire. He then called
my attention to a little looking-glass hanging from a nail on one side
of the chimney-piece.
“In case you should wish to look at yourself, miss, after the jour-
ney, as you’re going before the Chancellor. Not that it’s requisite, I
am sure,” said the young gentleman civilly.
“Going before the Chancellor?” I said, startled for a moment.
“Only a matter of form, miss,” returned the young gentleman.
“Mr. Kenge is in court now. He left his compliments, and would
you partake of some refreshment”—there were biscuits and a de-
canter of wine on a small table—”and look over the paper,” which
the young gentleman gave me as he spoke. He then stirred the fire
and left me.
Everything was so strange—the stranger from its being night in
the day-time, the candles burning with a white flame, and looking
raw and cold—that I read the words in the newspaper without know-
ing what they meant and found myself reading the same words re-
peatedly. As it was of no use going on in that way, I put the paper
down, took a peep at my bonnet in the glass to see if it was neat, and
looked at the room, which was not half lighted, and at the shabby,
dusty tables, and at the piles of writings, and at a bookcase full of the
most inexpressive-looking books that ever had anything to say for
themselves. Then I went on, thinking, thinking, thinking; and the
fire went on, burning, burning, burning; and the candles went on
flickering and guttering, and there were no snuffers—until the young
gentleman by and by brought a very dirty pair—for two hours.
At last Mr. Kenge came. He was not altered, but he was surprised
to see how altered I was and appeared quite pleased. “As you are
going to be the companion of the young lady who is now in the
Chancellor’s private room, Miss Summerson,” he said, “we thought
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it well that you should be in attendance also. You will not be discom-
posed by the Lord Chancellor, I dare say?”
“No, sir,” I said, “I don’t think I shall,” really not seeing on consid-
eration why I should be.
So Mr. Kenge gave me his arm and we went round the corner,
under a colonnade, and in at a side door. And so we came, along a
passage, into a comfortable sort of room where a young lady and a
young gentleman were standing near a great, loud-roaring fire. A
screen was interposed between them and it, and they were leaning on
the screen, talking.
They both looked up when I came in, and I saw in the young
lady, with the fire shining upon her, such a beautiful girl! With
such rich golden hair, such soft blue eyes, and such a bright, inno-
cent, trusting face!
“Miss Ada,” said Mr. Kenge, “this is Miss Summerson.”
She came to meet me with a smile of welcome and her hand ex-
tended, but seemed to change her mind in a moment and kissed me.
In short, she had such a natural, captivating, winning manner that in
a few minutes we were sitting in the window-seat, with the light of
the fire upon us, talking together as free and happy as could be.
What a load off my mind! It was so delightful to know that she
could confide in me and like me! It was so good of her, and so en-
couraging to me!
The young gentleman was her distant cousin, she told me, and his
name Richard Carstone. He was a handsome youth with an ingenu-
ous face and a most engaging laugh; and after she had called him up
to where we sat, he stood by us, in the light of the fire, talking gaily,
like a light-hearted boy. He was very young, not more than nineteen
then, if quite so much, but nearly two years older than she was. They
were both orphans and (what was very unexpected and curious to
me) had never met before that day. Our all three coming together for
the first time in such an unusual place was a thing to talk about, and
we talked about it; and the fire, which had left off roaring, winked
its red eyes at us—as Richard said—like a drowsy old Chancery lion.
We conversed in a low tone because a full-dressed gentleman in a
bag wig frequenfly came in and out, and when he did so, we could
hear a drawling sound in the distance, which he said was one of the
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curtsy and a smile between every little sentence, “Youth. And hope.
And beauty. And Chancery. And Conversation Kenge! Ha! Pray accept
my blessing!”
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CHAPTER IV
Telescopic Philanthropy
WE WERE TO PASS THE NIGHT, Mr. Kenge told us when we arrived in
his room, at Mrs. Jellyby’s; and then he turned to me and said he
took it for granted I knew who Mrs. Jellyby was.
“I really don’t, sir,” I returned. “Perhaps Mr. Carstone—or Miss
Clare—”
But no, they knew nothing whatever about Mrs. Jellyby. “In-deed!
Mrs. Jellyby,” said Mr. Kenge, standing with his back to the fire and
casting his eyes over the dusty hearth-rug as if it were Mrs. Jellyby’s
biography, “is a lady of very remarkable strength of character who
devotes herself entirely to the public. She has devoted herself to an
extensive variety of public subjects at various times and is at present
(until something else attracts her) devoted to the subject of Africa,
with a view to the general cultivation of the coffee berry—and the
natives—and the happy settlement, on the banks of the African riv-
ers, of our superabundant home population. Mr. Jarndyce, who is
desirous to aid any work that is considered likely to be a good work
and who is much sought after by philanthropists, has, I believe, a
very high opinion of Mrs. Jellyby.”
Mr. Kenge, adjusting his cravat, then looked at us.
“And Mr. Jellyby, sir?” suggested Richard.
“Ah! Mr. Jellyby,” said Mr. Kenge, “is—a—I don’t know that I
can describe him to you better than by saying that he is the husband
of Mrs. Jellyby.”
“A nonentity, sir?” said Richard with a droll look.
“I don’t say that,” returned Mr. Kenge gravely. “I can’t say that,
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grate but ashes, a bundle of wood, and a poker), “you find me, my
dears, as usual, very busy; but that you will excuse. The African project
at present employs my whole time. It involves me in correspondence
with public bodies and with private individuals anxious for the wel-
fare of their species all over the country. I am happy to say it is ad-
vancing. We hope by this time next year to have from a hundred and
fifty to two hundred healthy families cultivating coffee and educat-
ing the natives of Borrioboola-Gha, on the left bank of the Niger.”
As Ada said nothing, but looked at me, I said it must be very
gratifying.
“It is gratifying,” said Mrs. Jellyby. “It involves the devotion of all
my energies, such as they are; but that is nothing, so that it succeeds;
and I am more confident of success every day. Do you know, Miss
Summerson, I almost wonder that you never turned your thoughts
to Africa.”
This application of the subject was really so unexpected to me that
I was quite at a loss how to receive it. I hinted that the Climate—
“The finest climate in the world!” said Mrs. Jellyby.
“Indeed, ma’am?”
“Certainly. With precaution,” said Mrs. Jellyby. “You may go into Holborn,
without precaution, and be run over. You may go into Holborn, with precaution,
and never be run over. Just so with Africa.”
I said, “No doubt.” I meant as to Holborn.
“If you would like,” said Mrs. Jellyby, putting a number of papers
towards us, “to look over some remarks on that head, and on the
general subject, which have been extensively circulated, while I finish
a letter I am now dictating to my eldest daughter, who is my amanu-
ensis—”
The girl at the table left off biting her pen and made a return to our
recognition, which was half bashful and half sulky.
“—I shall then have finished for the present,” proceeded Mrs. Jellyby
with a sweet smile, “though my work is never done. Where are you,
Caddy?”
“‘Presents her compliments to Mr. Swallow, and begs—’” said
Caddy.
“‘And begs,’” said Mrs. Jellyby, dictating, “‘to inform him, in refer-
ence to his letter of inquiry on the African project—’ No, Peepy! Not
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on my account!”
Peepy (so self-named) was the unfortunate child who had fallen
downstairs, who now interrupted the correspondence by presenting
himself, with a strip of plaster on his forehead, to exhibit his wounded
knees, in which Ada and I did not know which to pity most—the
bruises or the dirt. Mrs. Jellyby merely added, with the serene com-
posure with which she said everything, “Go along, you naughty
Peepy!” and fixed her fine eyes on Africa again.
However, as she at once proceeded with her dictation, and as I
interrupted nothing by doing it, I ventured quietly to stop poor Peepy
as he was going out and to take him up to nurse. He looked very
much astonished at it and at Ada’s kissing him, but soon fell fast
asleep in my arms, sobbing at longer and longer intervals, until he
was quiet. I was so occupied with Peepy that I lost the letter in detail,
though I derived such a general impression from it of the momen-
tous importance of Africa, and the utter insignificance of all other
places and things, that I felt quite ashamed to have thought so little
about it.
“Six o’clock!” said Mrs. Jellyby. “And our dinner hour is nomi-
nally (for we dine at all hours) five! Caddy, show Miss Clare and
Miss Summerson their rooms. You will like to make some change,
perhaps? You will excuse me, I know, being so much occupied. Oh,
that very bad child! Pray put him down, Miss Summerson!”
I begged permission to retain him, truly saying that he was not at
all troublesome, and carried him upstairs and laid him on my bed.
Ada and I had two upper rooms with a door of communication
between. They were excessively bare and disorderly, and the curtain
to my window was fastened up with a fork.
“You would like some hot water, wouldn’t you?” said Miss Jellyby,
looking round for a jug with a handle to it, but looking in vain.
“If it is not being troublesome,” said we.
“Oh, it’s not the trouble,” returned Miss Jellyby; “the question is,
if there is any.”
The evening was so very cold and the rooms had such a marshy
smell that I must confess it was a little miserable, and Ada was half
crying. We soon laughed, however, and were busily unpacking when
Miss Jellyby came back to say that she was sorry there was no hot
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water, but they couldn’t find the kettle, and the boiler was out of order.
We begged her not to mention it and made all the haste we could
to get down to the fire again. But all the little children had come up
to the landing outside to look at the phenomenon of Peepy lying on
my bed, and our attention was distracted by the constant apparition
of noses and fingers in situations of danger between the hinges of the
doors. It was impossible to shut the door of either room, for my
lock, with no knob to it, looked as if it wanted to be wound up; and
though the handle of Ada’s went round and round with the greatest
smoothness, it was attended with no effect whatever on the door.
Therefore I proposed to the children that they should come in and
be very good at my table, and I would tell them the story of Little
Red Riding Hood while I dressed; which they did, and were as quiet
as mice, including Peepy, who awoke opportunely before the appear-
ance of the wolf.
When we went downstairs we found a mug with “A Present from
Tunbridge Wells” on it lighted up in the staircase window with a float-
ing wick, and a young woman, with a swelled face bound up in a
flannel bandage blowing the fire of the drawing-room (now connected
by an open door with Mrs. Jellyby’s room) and choking dreadfully. It
smoked to that degree, in short, that we all sat coughing and crying
with the windows open for half an hour, during which Mrs. Jellyby,
with the same sweetness of temper, directed letters about Africa. Her
being so employed was, I must say, a great relief to me, for Richard
told us that he had washed his hands in a pie-dish and that they had
found the kettle on his dressing-table, and he made Ada laugh so that
they made me laugh in the most ridiculous manner.
Soon after seven o’clock we went down to dinner, carefully, by
Mrs. Jellyby’s advice, for the stair-carpets, besides being very defi-
cient in stair-wires, were so torn as to be absolute traps. We had a fine
cod-fish, a piece of roast beef, a dish of cutlets, and a pudding; an
excellent dinner, if it had had any cooking to speak of, but it was
almost raw. The young woman with the flannel bandage waited, and
dropped everything on the table wherever it happened to go, and
never moved it again until she put it on the stairs. The person I had
seen in pattens, who I suppose to have been the cook, frequently
came and skirmished with her at the door,
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head against the wall as if he were subject to low spirits. It seemed that
he had several times opened his mouth when alone with Richard after
dinner, as if he had something on his mind, but had always shut it
again, to Richard’s extreme confusion, without saying anything.
Mrs. Jellyby, sitting in quite a nest of waste paper, drank coffee all
the evening and dictated at intervals to her eldest daughter. She also
held a discussion with Mr. Quale, of which the subject seemed to
be—if I understood it—the brotherhood of humanity, and gave ut-
terance to some beautiful sentiments. I was not so attentive an audi-
tor as I might have wished to be, however, for Peepy and the other
children came flocking about Ada and me in a corner of the drawing-
room to ask for another story; so we sat down among them and told
them in whispers “Puss in Boots” and I don’t know what else until
Mrs. Jellyby, accidentally remembering them, sent them to bed. As
Peepy cried for me to take him to bed, I carried him upstairs, where
the young woman with the flannel bandage charged into the midst
of the little family like a dragon and overturned them into cribs.
After that I occupied myself in making our room a little tidy and
in coaxing a very cross fire that had been lighted to burn, which at
last it did, quite brightly. On my return downstairs, I felt that Mrs.
Jellyby looked down upon me rather for being so frivolous, and I
was sorry for it, though at the same time I knew that I had no higher
pretensions.
It was nearly midnight before we found an opportunity of going
to bed, and even then we left Mrs. Jellyby among her papers drink-
ing coffee and Miss Jellyby biting the feather of her pen.
“What a strange house!” said Ada when we got upstairs. “How
curious of my cousin Jarndyce to send us here!”
“My love,” said I, “it quite confuses me. I want to understand it,
and I can’t understand it at all.”
“What?” asked Ada with her pretty smile.
“All this, my dear,” said I. “It must be very good of Mrs. Jellyby to
take such pains about a scheme for the benefit of natives—and yet—
Peepy and the housekeeping!”
Ada laughed and put her arm about my neck as I stood looking at the
fire, and told me I was a quiet, dear, good creature and had won her
heart. “You are so thoughtful, Esther,” she said, “and yet so cheerful! And
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my dress in the same manner. By degrees the poor tired girl fell asleep,
and then I contrived to raise her head so that it should rest on my lap,
and to cover us both with shawls. The fire went out, and all night
long she slumbered thus before the ashy grate. At first I was painfully
awake and vainly tried to lose myself, with my eyes closed, among
the scenes of the day. At length, by slow degrees, they became indis-
tinct and mingled. I began to lose the identity of the sleeper resting
on me. Now it was Ada, now one of my old Reading friends from
whom I could not believe I had so recently parted. Now it was the
little mad woman worn out with curtsying and smiling, now some
one in authority at Bleak House. Lastly, it was no one, and I was no
one.
The purblind day was feebly struggling with the fog when I opened
my eyes to encounter those of a dirty-faced little spectre fixed upon
me. Peepy had scaled his crib, and crept down in his bed-gown and
cap, and was so cold that his teeth were chattering as if he had cut
them all.
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CHAPTER V
A Morning Adventure
ALTHOUGH THE MORNING WAS RAW, and although the fog still seemed
heavy—I say seemed, for the windows were so encrusted with dirt that
they would have made midsummer sunshine dim—I was sufficiently
forewarned of the discomfort within doors at that early hour and suf-
ficiently curious about London to think it a good idea on the part of
Miss Jellyby when she proposed that we should go out for a walk.
“Ma won’t be down for ever so long,” she said, “and then it’s a
chance if breakfast’s ready for an hour afterwards, they dawdle so. As
to Pa, he gets what he can and goes to the office. He never has what
you would call a regular breakfast. Priscilla leaves him out the loaf
and some milk, when there is any, overnight. Sometimes there isn’t
any milk, and sometimes the cat drinks it. But I’m afraid you must
be tired, Miss Summerson, and perhaps you would rather go to bed.”
“I am not at all tired, my dear,” said I, “and would much prefer to
go out.”
“If you’re sure you would,” returned Miss Jellyby, “I’ll get my things
on.”
Ada said she would go too, and was soon astir. I made a proposal
to Peepy, in default of being able to do anything better for him, that
he should let me wash him and afterwards lay him down on my bed
again. To this he submitted with the best grace possible, staring at me
during the whole operation as if he never had been, and never could
again be, so astonished in his life—looking very miserable also, cer-
tainly, but making no complaint, and going snugly to sleep as soon
as it was over. At first I was in two minds about taking such a liberty,
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but I soon reflected that nobody in the house was likely to notice it.
What with the bustle of dispatching Peepy and the bustle of get-
ting myself ready and helping Ada, I was soon quite in a glow. We
found Miss Jellyby trying to warm herself at the fire in the writing-
room, which Priscilla was then lighting with a smutty parlour candle-
stick, throwing the candle in to make it burn better. Everything was
just as we had left it last night and was evidently intended to remain
so. Below-stairs the dinner-cloth had not been taken away, but had
been left ready for breakfast. Crumbs, dust, and waste-paper were all
over the house. Some pewter pots and a milk-can hung on the area
railings; the door stood open; and we met the cook round the corner
coming out of a public-house, wiping her
mouth. She mentioned, as she passed us, that she had been to see
what o’clock it was.
But before we met the cook, we met Richard, who was dancing up
and down Thavies Inn to warm his feet. He was agreeably surprised to
see us stirring so soon and said he would gladly share our walk. So he
took care of Ada, and Miss Jellyby and I went first. I may mention
that Miss Jellyby had relapsed into her sulky manner and that I really
should not have thought she liked me much unless she had told me so.
“Where would you wish to go?” she asked.
“Anywhere, my dear,” I replied.
“Anywhere’s nowhere,” said Miss Jellyby, stopping perversely.
“Let us go somewhere at any rate,” said I.
She then walked me on very fast.
“I don’t care!” she said. “Now, you are my witness, Miss Summerson,
I say I don’t care-but if he was to come to our house with his great,
shining, lumpy forehead night after night till he was as old as Methuselah,
I wouldn’t have anything to say to him. Such asses as he and Ma make
of themselves!”
“My dear!” I remonstrated, in allusion to the epithet and the vig-
orous emphasis Miss Jellyby set upon it. “Your duty as a child—”
“Oh! Don’t talk of duty as a child, Miss Summerson; where’s Ma’s
duty as a parent? All made over to the public and Africa, I suppose!
Then let the public and Africa show duty as a child; it’s much more
their affair than mine. You are shocked, I dare say! Very well, so am I
shocked too; so we are both shocked, and there’s an end of it!”
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recovering herself, with her head on one side, from a very low curtsy.
Richard, anxious to atone for his thoughtlessness of yesterday, good-
naturedly explained that Miss Jellyby was not connected with the suit.
“Ha!” said the old lady. “She does not expect a judgment? She will
still grow old. But not so old. Oh, dear, no! This is the garden of
Lincoln’s Inn. I call it my garden. It is quite a bower in the summer-
time. Where the birds sing melodiously. I pass the greater part of the
long vacation here. In contemplation. You find the long vacation ex-
ceedingly long, don’t you?”
We said yes, as she seemed to expect us to say so.
“When the leaves are falling from the trees and there are no more
flowers in bloom to make up into nosegays for the Lord
Chancellor’s court,” said the old lady, “the vacation is fulfilled and
the sixth seal, mentioned in the Revelations, again prevails. Pray
come and see my lodging. It will be a good omen for me. Youth,
and hope, and beauty are very seldom there. It is a long, long time
since I had a visit from either.”
She had taken my hand, and leading me and Miss Jellyby away,
beckoned Richard and Ada to come too. I did not know how to
excuse myself and looked to Richard for aid. As he was half amused
and half curious and all in doubt how to get rid of the old lady
without offence, she continued to lead us away, and he and Ada
continued to follow, our strange conductress informing us all the
time, with much smiling condescension, that she lived close by.
It was quite true, as it soon appeared. She lived so close by that we
had not time to have done humouring her for a few moments before
she was at home. Slipping us out at a little side gate, the old lady
stopped most unexpectedly in a narrow back street, part of some
courts and lanes immediately outside the wall of the inn, and said,
“This is my lodging. Pray walk up!”
She had stopped at a shop over which was written KROOK, RAG
AND BOTTLE WAREHOUSE. Also, in long thin letters,
KROOK, DEALER IN MARINE STORES. In one part of the win-
dow was a picture of a red paper mill at which a cart was unloading a
quantity of sacks of old rags. In another was the inscription BONES
BOUGHT. In another, KITCHEN-STUFF BOUGHT. In another,
OLD IRON BOUGHT. In another, WASTE-PAPER BOUGHT.
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“Hi, hi!” said the old man, coming to the door. “Have you any-
thing to sell?”
We naturally drew back and glanced at our conductress, who had
been trying to open the house-door with a key she had taken from
her pocket, and to whom Richard now said that as we had had the
pleasure of seeing where she lived, we would leave her, being pressed
for time. But she was not to be so easily left. She became so fantasti-
cally and pressingly earnest in her entreaties that we would walk up
and see her apartment for an instant, and was so bent, in her harmless
way, on leading me in, as part of the good omen she desired, that I
(whatever the others might do) saw nothing for it but to comply. I
suppose we were all more or less curious; at any rate, when the old
man added his persuasions to hers and said, “Aye, aye! Please her! It
won’t take a minute! Come in,
come in! Come in through the shop if t’other door’s out of order!”
we all went in, stimulated by Richard’s laughing encouragement and
relying on his protection.
“My landlord, Krook,” said the little old lady, condescending to
him from her lofty station as she presented him to us. “He is called
among the neighbours the Lord Chancellor. His shop is called the
Court of Chancery. He is a very eccentric person. He is very odd. Oh,
I assure you he is very odd!”
She shook her head a great many times and tapped her forehead
with her finger to express to us that we must have the goodness to
excuse him, “For he is a little—you know—M!” said the old lady
with great stateliness. The old man overheard, and laughed.
“It’s true enough,” he said, going before us with the lantern, “that
they call me the lord chancellor and call my shop Chancery. And
why do you think they call me the Lord Chancellor and my shop
Chancery?”
“I don’t know, I am sure!” said Richard rather carelessly.
“You see,” said the old man, stopping and turning round, “they—
Hi! Here’s lovely hair! I have got three sacks of ladies’ hair below, but
none so beautiful and fine as this. What colour, and what texture!”
“That’ll do, my good friend!” said Richard, strongly disapproving
of his having drawn one of Ada’s tresses through his yellow hand.
“You can admire as the rest of us do without taking that liberty.”
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The old man darted at him a sudden look which even called my
attention from Ada, who, startled and blushing, was so remarkably
beautiful that she seemed to fix the wandering attention of the little
old lady herself. But as Ada interposed and laughingly said she could
only feel proud of such genuine admiration, Mr. Krook shrunk into
his former self as suddenly as he had leaped out of it.
“You see, I have so many things here,” he resumed, holding up the
lantern, “of so many kinds, and all as the neighbours think (but they
know nothing), wasting away and going to rack and ruin, that that’s
why they have given me and my place a christening. And I have so
many old parchmentses and papers in my stock. And I have a liking
for rust and must and cobwebs. And all’s fish that comes to
my net. And I can’t abear to part with anything I once lay hold of (or
so my neighbours think, but what do they know?) or to alter any-
thing, or to have any sweeping, nor scouring, nor cleaning, nor re-
pairing going on about me. That’s the way I’ve got the ill name of
Chancery. I don’t mind. I go to see my noble and learned brother
pretty well every day, when he sits in the Inn. He don’t notice me,
but I notice him. There’s no great odds betwixt us. We both grub on
in a muddle. Hi, Lady Jane!”
A large grey cat leaped from some neighbouring shelf on his shoul-
der and startled us all.
“Hi! Show ‘em how you scratch. Hi! Tear, my lady!” said her master.
The cat leaped down and ripped at a bundle of rags with her tigerish
claws, with a sound that it set my teeth on edge to hear.
“She’d do as much for any one I was to set her on,” said the old
man. “I deal in cat-skins among other general matters, and hers was
offered to me. It’s a very fine skin, as you may see, but I didn’t have
it stripped off! that warn’t like Chancery practice though, says you!”
He had by this time led us across the shop, and now opened a door in
the back part of it, leading to the house-entry. As he stood with his hand
upon the lock, the little old lady graciously observed to him before pass-
ing out, “That will do, Krook. You mean well, but are tiresome. My
young friends are pressed for time. I have none to spare myself, having to
attend court very soon. My young friends are the wards in Jarndyce.”
“Jarndyce!” said the old man with a start.
“Jarndyce and Jarndyce. The great suit, Krook,” returned his lodger.
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“I can’t allow them to sing much,” said the little old lady, “for
(you’ll think this curious) I find my mind confused by the idea that
they are singing while I am following the arguments in court. And
my mind requires to be so very clear, you know! Another time, I’ll
tell you their names. Not at present. On a day of such good omen,
they shall sing as much as they like. In honour of youth,” a smile and
curtsy, “hope,” a smile and curtsy, “and beauty,” a smile and curtsy.
“There! We’ll let in the full light.”
The birds began to stir and chirp.
“I cannot admit the air freely,” said the little old lady—the room
was close, and would have been the better for it—”because the cat you
saw downstairs, called Lady Jane, is greedy for their lives. She crouches
on the parapet outside for hours and hours. I have discovered,” whis-
pering mysteriously, “that her natural cruelty is sharpened by a jealous
fear of their regaining their liberty. In consequence of the judgment I
expect being shortly given. She is sly and full of malice. I half believe,
sometimes, that she is no cat, but the wolf of the old saying. It is so
very difficult to keep her from the door.”
Some neighbouring bells, reminding the poor soul that it was half-
past nine, did more for us in the way of bringing our visit to an end
than we could easily have done for ourselves. She hurriedly took up
her little bag of documents, which she had laid upon the table on
coming in, and asked if we were also going into court. On our an-
swering no, and that we would on no account detain her, she opened
the door to attend us downstairs.
“With such an omen, it is even more necessary than usual that I
should be there before the Chancellor comes in,” said she, “for he
might mention my case the first thing. I have a presentiment that he will
mention it the first thing this morning”
She stopped to tell us in a whisper as we were going down that the
whole house was filled with strange lumber which her landlord had
bought piecemeal and had no wish to sell, in consequence of being a
little M. This was on the first floor. But she had made a previous stop-
page on the second floor and had silently pointed at a dark door there.
“The only other lodger,” she now whispered in explanation, “a law-
writer. The children in the lanes here say he has sold himself to the
devil. I don’t know what he can have done with the money. Hush!”
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She appeared to mistrust that the lodger might hear her even there,
and repeating “Hush!” went before us on tiptoe as though even the
sound of her footsteps might reveal to him what she had said.
Passing through the shop on our way out, as we had passed through
it on our way in, we found the old man storing a quantity of packets
of waste-paper in a kind of well in the floor. He seemed to be work-
ing hard, with the perspiration standing on his forehead, and had a
piece of chalk by him, with which, as he put each separate package or
bundle down, he made a crooked mark on the panelling of the wall.
Richard and Ada, and Miss Jellyby, and the little old lady had gone
by him, and I was going when he touched me on the arm to stay me,
and chalked the letter J upon the wall—in a very curious manner,
beginning with the end of the letter and shaping it backward. It was
a capital letter, not a printed one, but just such a letter as any clerk in
Messrs. Kenge and Carboy’s office would have made.
“Can you read it?” he asked me with a keen glance.
“Surely,” said I. “It’s very plain.”
“What is it?”
“J.”
With another glance at me, and a glance at the door, he rubbed it
out and turned an “a” in its place (not a capital letter this time), and
said, “What’s that?”
I told him. He then rubbed that out and turned the letter “r,” and
asked me the same question. He went on quickly until he had formed
in the same curious manner, beginning at the ends and bottoms of
the letters, the word Jarndyce, without once leaving two letters on
the wall together.
“What does that spell?” he asked me.
When I told him, he laughed. In the same odd way, yet with the
same rapidity, he then produced singly, and rubbed out singly, the
letters forming the words Bleak House. These, in some astonish-
ment, I also read; and he laughed again.
“Hi!” said the old man, laying aside the chalk. “I have a turn for copy-
ing from memory, you see, miss, though I can neither read nor write.”
He looked so disagreeable and his cat looked so wickedly at me, as
if I were a blood-relation of the birds upstairs, that I was quite re-
lieved by Richard’s appearing at the door and saying, “Miss
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Summerson, I hope you are not bargaining for the sale of your hair.
Don’t be tempted. Three sacks below are quite enough for Mr.
Krook!”
I lost no time in wishing Mr. Krook good morning and joining
my friends outside, where we parted with the little old lady, who
gave us her blessing with great ceremony and renewed her assurance
of yesterday in reference to her intention of settling estates on Ada
and me. Before we finally turned out of those lanes, we looked back
and saw Mr. Krook standing at his shop-door, in his spectacles, look-
ing after us, with his cat upon his shoulder, and her tail sticking up
on one side of his hairy cap like a tall feather.
“Quite an adventure for a morning in London!” said Richard with
a sigh. “Ah, cousin, cousin, it’s a weary word this Chancery!”
“It is to me, and has been ever since I can remember,” returned
Ada. “I am grieved that I should be the enemy—-as I suppose I
am—of a great number of relations and others, and that they should
be my enemies—as I suppose they are—and that we should all be
ruining one another without knowing how or why and be in con-
stant doubt and discord all our lives. It seems very strange, as there
must be right somewhere, that an honest judge in real earnest has
not been able to find out through all these years where it is.”
“Ah, cousin!” said Richard. “Strange, indeed! All this wasteful,
wanton chess-playing is very strange. To see that composed court
yesterday jogging on so serenely and to think of the wretchedness of
the pieces on the board gave me the headache and the heartache both
together. My head ached with wondering how it happened, if men
were neither fools nor rascals; and my heart ached to think they could
possibly be either. But at all events, Ada—I may call you Ada?”
“Of course you may, cousin Richard.”
“At all events, Chancery will work none of its bad influences on us.
We have happily been brought together, thanks to our good kins-
man, and it can’t divide us now!”
“Never, I hope, cousin Richard!” said Ada gently.
Miss Jellyby gave my arm a squeeze and me a very significant look. I
smiled in return, and we made the rest of the way back very pleasantly.
In half an hour after our arrival, Mrs. Jellyby appeared; and in the
course of an hour the various things necessary for breakfast straggled
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one by one into the dining-room. I do not doubt that Mrs. Jellyby
had gone to bed and got up in the usual manner, but she presented
no appearance of having changed her dress. She was greatly occupied
during breakfast, for the morning’s post brought a heavy correspon-
dence relative to Borrioboola-Gha, which would occasion her (she
said) to pass a busy day. The children tumbled about, and notched
memoranda of their accidents in their legs, which were perfect little
calendars of distress; and Peepy was lost for an hour and a half, and
brought home from Newgate market by a policeman. The equable
manner in which Mrs. Jellyby sustained both his absence and his
restoration to the family circle surprised us all.
She was by that time perseveringly dictating to Caddy, and Caddy
was fast relapsing into the inky condition in which we had found
her. At one o’clock an open carriage arrived for us, and a cart for our
luggage. Mrs. Jellyby charged us with many remembrances to her
good friend Mr. Jarndyce; Caddy left her desk to see us depart, kissed
me in the passage, and stood biting her pen and sobbing on the steps;
Peepy, I am happy to say, was asleep and spared the pain of separation
(I was not without misgivings that he had gone to
Newgate market in search of me); and all the other children got up
behind the barouche and fell off, and we saw them, with great con-
cern, scattered over the surface of Thavies Inn as we rolled out of its
precincts.
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CHAPTER VI
Quite at Home
THE DAY HAD BRIGHTENED very much, and still brightened as we went
westward. We went our way through the sunshine and the fresh air,
wondering more and more at the extent of the streets, the brilliancy
of the shops, the great traffic, and the crowds of people whom the
pleasanter weather seemed to have brought out like many-coloured
flowers. By and by we began to leave the wonderful city and to pro-
ceed through suburbs which, of themselves, would have made a pretty
large town in my eyes; and at last we got into a real country road
again, with windmills, rick-yards, milestones, farmers’ waggons, scents
of old hay, swinging signs, and horse troughs: trees, fields, and hedge-
rows. It was delightful to see the green landscape before us and the
immense metropolis behind; and when a waggon with a train of
beautiful horses, furnished with red trappings and clear-sounding
bells, came by us with its music, I believe we could all three have
sung to the bells, so cheerful were the influences around.
“The whole road has been reminding me of my name-sake
Whittington,” said Richard, “and that waggon is the finishing touch.
Halloa! What’s the matter?”
We had stopped, and the waggon had stopped too. Its music
changed as the horses came to a stand, and subsided to a gentle tin-
kling, except when a horse tossed his head or shook himself and
sprinkled off a little shower of bell-ringing.
“Our postilion is looking after the waggoner,” said Richard, “and
the waggoner is coming back after us. Good day, friend!” The
waggoner was at our coach-door. “Why, here’s an extraordinary thing!”
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added Richard, looking closely at the man. “He has got your name,
Ada, in his hat!”
He had all our names in his hat. Tucked within the band were three
small notes—one addressed to Ada, one to Richard, one to me. These the
waggoner delivered to each of us respectively, reading the name aloud first.
In answer to Richard’s inquiry from whom they came, he briefly answered,
“Master, sir, if you please”; and putting on his hat again (which was like a
soft bowl), cracked his whip, re-awakened his music, and went melodi-
ously away.
“Is that Mr. Jarndyce’s waggon?” said Richard, calling to our post-boy.
“Yes, sir,” he replied. “Going to London.”
We opened the notes. Each was a counterpart of the other and
contained these words in a solid, plain hand.
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months. This discourse led to a great deal more on the same theme,
and indeed it lasted us all day, and we talked of scarcely anything else.
If we did by any chance diverge into another subject, we soon re-
turned to this, and wondered what the house would be like, and
when we should get there, and whether we should see Mr. Jarndyce
as soon as we arrived or after a delay, and what he would say to us,
and what we should say to him. All of which we wondered about,
over and over again.
The roads were very heavy for the horses, but the pathway was
generally good, so we alighted and walked up all the hills, and liked
it so well that we prolonged our walk on the level ground when we
got to the top. At Barnet there were other horses waiting for us, but
as they had only just been fed, we had to wait for them too, and got
a long fresh walk over a common and an old battle-field before the
carriage came up. These delays so protracted the journey that the
short day was spent and the long night had closed in before we came
to St. Albans, near to which town Bleak House was, we knew.
By that time we were so anxious and nervous that even Richard
confessed, as we rattled over the stones of the old street, to feeling an
irrational desire to drive back again. As to Ada and me, whom he had
wrapped up with great care, the night being sharp and frosty, we
trembled from head to foot. When we turned out of the town, round
a corner, and Richard told us that the post-boy, who had for a long
time sympathized with our heightened expectation, was looking back
and nodding, we both stood up in the carriage (Richard holding Ada
lest she should be jolted down) and gazed round upon the open
country and the starlight night for our
destination. There was a light sparkling on the top of a hill before us,
and the driver, pointing to it with his whip and crying, “That’s Bleak
House!” put his horses into a canter and took us forward at such a
rate, uphill though it was, that the wheels sent the road drift flying
about our heads like spray from a water-mill. Presently we lost the
light, presently saw it, presently lost it, presently saw it, and turned
into an avenue of trees and cantered up towards where it was beam-
ing brightly. It was in a window of what seemed to be an old-fash-
ioned house with three peaks in the roof in front and a circular sweep
leading to the porch. A bell was rung as we drew up, and amidst the
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sound of its deep voice in the still air, and the distant barking of
some dogs, and a gush of
light from the opened door, and the smoking and steaming of the
heated horses, and the quickened beating of our own hearts, we
alighted in no inconsiderable confusion.
“Ada, my love, Esther, my dear, you are welcome. I rejoice to see
you! Rick, if I had a hand to spare at present, I would give it you!”
The gentleman who said these words in a clear, bright, hospitable
voice had one of his arms round Ada’s waist and the other round
mine, and kissed us both in a fatherly way, and bore us across the hall
into a ruddy little room, all in a glow with a blazing fire. Here he
kissed us again, and opening his arms, made us sit down side by side
on a sofa ready drawn out near the hearth. I felt that if we had been at
all demonstrative, he would have run away in a moment.
“Now, Rick!” said he. “I have a hand at liberty. A word in
earnest is as good as a speech. I am heartily glad to see you. You are at
home. Warm yourself!”
Richard shook him by both hands with an intuitive mixture of respect
and frankness, and only saying (though with an earnestness that rather alarmed
me, I was so afraid of Mr. Jarndyce’s suddenly disappearing), “You are very
kind, sir! We are very much obliged to you!” laid aside his hat and coat and
came up to the fire.
“And how did you like the ride? And how did you like Mrs. Jellyby,
my dear?” said Mr. Jarndyce to Ada.
While Ada was speaking to him in reply, I glanced (I need not say
with how much interest) at his face. It was a handsome, lively, quick
face, full of change and motion; and his hair was a silvered iron-grey. I
took him to be nearer sixty than fifty, but he was upright, hearty, and
robust. From the moment of his first speaking to us his voice had
connected itself with an association in my mind that I could not de-
fine; but now, all at once, a something sudden in his manner and a
pleasant expression in his eyes recalled the gentleman in the stagecoach
six years ago on the memorable day of my journey to Reading. I was
certain it was he. I never was so frightened in my life as when I made
the discovery, for he caught my glance, and appearing to read my
thoughts, gave such a look at the door that I thought we had lost him.
However, I am happy to say he remained where he was, and asked
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which room was henceforth to belong to Ada and me. Out of this
you went up three steps into Ada’s bedroom, which had a fine broad
window commanding a beautiful view (we saw a great expanse of
darkness lying underneath the stars), to which there was a hollow
window-seat, in which, with a spring-lock, three dear Adas might
have been lost at once. Out of this room you passed into a little
gallery, with which the other best rooms (only two) communicated,
and so, by a little staircase of shallow steps with a number of corner
stairs in it, considering its length, down into the hall. But if instead
of going out at Ada’s door you came back into my room, and went
out at the door by which you had entered it, and turned up a few
crooked steps that branched off in an unexpected manner from the
stairs, you lost yourself in passages, with mangles in them, and three-
cornered tables, and a native Hindu chair, which was also a sofa, a
box, and a bedstead, and looked in every form something between a
bamboo skeleton and a great bird-cage, and had been brought from
India nobody knew by whom or when. From these you came on
Richard’s room, which was part library, part sitting-room, part bed-
room, and seemed indeed a comfortable compound of many rooms.
Out of that you went straight, with a little interval of passage, to the
plain room where Mr. Jarndyce slept, all the year round, with his
window open, his bedstead without any furniture standing in the
middle of the floor for more air, and his cold bath gaping for him in
a smaller room adjoining. Out of that you came into another pas-
sage, where there were back-stairs and where you could hear the horses
being rubbed down outside the stable and being told to “Hold up”
and “Get over,” as they slipped about very much on the uneven stones.
Or you might, if you came out at another door (every room had at
least two doors), go straight down to the hall again by half-a-dozen
steps and a low archway, wondering how you got back there or had
ever got out of it.
The furniture, old-fashioned rather than old, like the house, was
as pleasantly irregular. Ada’s sleeping-room was all flowers—in chintz
and paper, in velvet, in needlework, in the brocade of two stiff courtly
chairs which stood, each attended by a little page of a stool for greater
state, on either side of the fire-place. Our sitting-room was green and
had framed and glazed upon the walls numbers of surprising and
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“He knows Mrs. Jellyby,” said Mr. Jarndyce. “He is a musical man,
an amateur, but might have been a professional. He is an artist too,
an amateur, but might have been a professional. He is a man of at-
tainments and of captivating manners. He has been unfortunate in
his affairs, and unfortunate in his pursuits, and unfortunate in his
family; but he don’t care—he’s a child!”
“Did you imply that he has children of his own, sir?” inquired
Richard.
“Yes, Rick! Half-a-dozen. More! Nearer a dozen, I should think.
But he has never looked after them. How could he? He wanted some-
body to look after him. He is a child, you know!” said Mr. Jarndyce.
“And have the children looked after themselves at all, sir?”
inquired Richard.
“Why, just as you may suppose,” said Mr. Jarndyce, his counte-
nance suddenly falling. “It is said that the children of the very poor
are not brought up, but dragged up. Harold Skimpole’s children
have tumbled up somehow or other. The wind’s getting round again,
I am afraid. I feel it rather!”
Richard observed that the situation was exposed on a sharp night.
“It is exposed,” said Mr. Jarndyce. “No doubt that’s the cause. Bleak
House has an exposed sound. But you are coming my way. Come
along!”
Our luggage having arrived and being all at hand, I was dressed in
a few minutes and engaged in putting my worldly goods away when
a maid (not the one in attendance upon Ada, but another, whom I
had not seen) brought a basket into my room with two bunches of
keys in it, all labelled.
“For you, miss, if you please,” said she.
“For me?” said I.
“The housekeeping keys, miss.”
I showed my surprise, for she added with some little surprise on her
own part, “I was told to bring them as soon as you was alone, miss. Miss
Summerson, if I don’t deceive myself?”
“Yes,” said I. “That is my name.”
“The large bunch is the housekeeping, and the little bunch is the
cellars, miss. Any time you was pleased to appoint tomorrow morn-
ing, I was to show you the presses and things they belong to.”
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I said I would be ready at half-past six, and after she was gone,
stood looking at the basket, quite lost in the magnitude of my trust.
Ada found me thus and had such a delightful confidence in me when
I showed her the keys and told her about them that it would have
been insensibility and ingratitude not to feel encouraged. I knew, to
be sure, that it was the dear girl’s kindness, but I liked to be so pleas-
antly cheated.
When we went downstairs, we were presented to Mr. Skimpole,
who was standing before the fire telling Richard how fond he used to
be, in his school-time, of football. He was a little bright creature
with a rather large head, but a delicate face and a sweet voice, and
there was a perfect charm in him. All he said was so free from effort
and spontaneous and was said with such a captivating gaiety that it
was fascinating to hear him talk. Being of a more slender figure than
Mr. Jarndyce and having a richer complexion, with browner hair, he
looked younger. Indeed, he had more the appearance in all respects of
a damaged young man than a well-preserved elderly one. There was an
easy negligence in his manner and even in his dress (his hair carelessly
disposed, and his neckkerchief loose and flowing, as I have seen artists
paint their own portraits) which I could not separate from the idea of
a romantic youth who had undergone some unique process of depre-
ciation. It struck me as being not at all like the manner or appearance
of a man who had advanced in life by the usual road of years, cares, and
experiences.
I gathered from the conversation that Mr. Skimpole had been edu-
cated for the medical profession and had once lived, in his profes-
sional capacity, in the household of a German prince. He told us,
however, that as he had always been a mere child in point of weights
and measures and had never known anything about them (except
that they disgusted him), he had never been able to prescribe with
the requisite accuracy of detail. In fact, he said, he had no head for
detail. And he told us, with great humour, that when he was wanted
to bleed the prince or physic any of his people, he was generally
found lying on his back in bed, reading the newspapers or making
fancy-sketches in pencil, and couldn’t come. The prince, at last, ob-
jecting to this, “in which,” said Mr. Skimpole, in the frankest man-
ner, “he was perfectly right,” the engagement terminated, and Mr.
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qualities of Ada and Richard that Mr. Skimpole, seeing them for the
first time, should he so unreserved and should lay himself out to be
so exquisitely agreeable. They (and especially Richard) were naturally
pleased; for similar reasons, and considered it no common privilege
to be so freely confided in by such an attractive man. The more we
listened, the more gaily Mr. Skimpole talked. And what with his
fine hilarious manner and his engaging candour and his
genial way of lightly tossing his own weaknesses about, as if he had
said, “I am a child, you know! You are designing people compared
with me” (he really made me consider myself in that light) “but I am
gay and innocent; forget your worldly arts and play with me!” the
effect was absolutely dazzling.
He was so full of feeling too and had such a delicate sentiment for
what was beautiful or tender that he could have won a heart by that
alone. In the evening, when I was preparing to make tea and Ada was
touching the piano in the adjoining room and softly humming a
tune to her cousin Richard, which they had happened to mention, he
came and sat down on the sofa near me and so spoke of Ada that I
almost loved him.
“She is like the morning,” he said. “With that golden hair, those
blue eyes, and that fresh bloom on her cheek, she is like the summer
morning. The birds here will mistake her for it. We will not call such
a lovely young creature as that, who is a joy to all mankind, an or-
phan. She is the child of the universe.”
Mr. Jarndyce, I found, was standing near us with his hands behind
him and an attentive smile upon his face.
“The universe,” he observed, “makes rather an indifferent parent, I
am afraid.”
“Oh! I don’t know!” cried Mr. Skimpole buoyantly.
“I think I do know,” said Mr. Jarndyce.
“Well!” cried Mr. Skimpole. “You know the world (which in your
sense is the universe), and I know nothing of it, so you shall have your
way. But if I had mine,” glancing at the cousins, “there should be no
brambles of sordid realities in such a path as that. It should be strewn
with roses; it should lie through bowers, where there was no spring,
autumn, nor winter, but perpetual summer. Age or change should never
wither it. The base word money should never be breathed near it!”
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his delightful spirits and his easy flow of conversation, that Richard
and I seemed to retain the transferred impression of having been ar-
rested since dinner and that it was very curious altogether.
It was late before we separated, for when Ada was going at eleven
o’clock, Mr. Skimpole went to the piano and rattled hilariously that
the best of all ways to lengthen our days was to steal a few hours
from night, my dear! It was past twelve before he took his candle and
his radiant face out of the room, and I think he might have kept us
there, if he had seen fit, until daybreak. Ada and Richard were linger-
ing for a few moments by the fire, wondering whether Mrs. Jellyby
had yet finished her dictation for the day, when Mr. Jarndyce, who
had been out of the room, returned.
“Oh, dear me, what’s this, what’s this!” he said, rubbing his head
and walking about with his good-humoured vexation. “What’s this
they tell me? Rick, my boy, Esther, my dear, what have you been
doing? Why did you do it? How could you do it? How much apiece
was it? The wind’s round again. I feel it all over me!”
We neither of us quite knew what to answer.
“Come, Rick, come! I must settle this before I sleep. How much are
you out of pocket? You two made the money up, you know! Why did
you? How could you? Oh, Lord, yes, it’s due east—must be!”
“Really, sir,” said Richard, “I don’t think it would be honourable in me
to tell you. Mr. Skimpole relied upon us—”
“Lord bless you, my dear boy! He relies upon everybody!” said
Mr. Jarndyce, giving his head a great rub and stopping short.
“Indeed, sir?”
“Everybody! And he’ll be in the same scrape again next week!” said
Mr. Jarndyce, walking again at a great pace, with a candle in his hand
that had gone out. “He’s always in the same scrape. He was born in the
same scrape. I verily believe that the announcement in the newspapers
when his mother was confined was ‘On Tuesday last, at her residence
in Botheration Buildings, Mrs. Skimpole of a son in difficulties.’”
Richard laughed heartily but added, “Still, sir, I don’t want to shake
his confidence or to break his confidence, and if I submit to your
better knowledge again, that I ought to keep his secret, I hope you
will consider before you press me any more. Of course, if you do
press me, sir, I shall know I am wrong and will tell you.”
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them. My fancy, made a little wild by the wind perhaps, would not
consent to be all unselfish, either, though I would have persuaded it
to be so if I could. It wandered back to my godmother’s house and
came along the intervening track, raising up shadowy speculations
which had sometimes trembled there in the dark as to what knowl-
edge Mr. Jarndyce had of my earliest history—even as to the possi-
bility of his being my father, though that idle dream was quite gone
now.
It was all gone now, I remembered, getting up from the fire. It was
not for me to muse over bygones, but to act with a cheerful spirit and
a grateful heart. So I said to myself, “Esther, Esther, Esther! Duty, my
dear!” and gave my little basket of housekeeping keys such a shake that
they sounded like little bells and rang me hopefully to bed.
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CHAPTER VII
WHILE ESTHER SLEEPS, and while Esther wakes, it is still wet weather
down at the place in Lincolnshire. The rain is ever falling—drip,
drip, drip—by day and night upon the broad flagged terrace-pave-
ment, the Ghost’s Walk. The weather is so very bad down in
Lincolnshire that the liveliest imagination can scarcely apprehend its
ever being fine again. Not that there is any superabundant life of
imagination on the spot, for Sir Leicester is not here (and, truly, even
if he were, would not do much for it in that particular), but is in
Paris with my Lady; and solitude, with dusky wings, sits brooding
upon Chesney Wold.
There may be some motions of fancy among the lower animals at
Chesney Wold. The horses in the stables—the long stables in a bar-
ren, red-brick court-yard, where there is a great bell in a turret, and a
clock with a large face, which the pigeons who live near it and who
love to perch upon its shoulders seem to be always consulting—they
may contemplate some mental pictures of fine weather on occasions,
and may be better artists at them than the grooms. The old roan, so
famous for cross-country work, turning his large eyeball to the grated
window near his rack, may remember the fresh leaves that glisten
there at other times and the scents that stream in, and may have a fine
run with the hounds, while the human helper, clearing out the next
stall, never stirs beyond his pitchfork and birch-broom. The grey,
whose place is opposite the door and who with an impatient rattle of
his halter pricks his ears and turns his head so wistfully when it is
opened, and to whom the opener says, “‘Woa grey, then, steady!
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Noabody wants you to-day!” may know it quite as well as the man.
The whole seemingly monotonous and uncompanionable half-dozen,
stabled together, may pass the long wet hours when the door is shut
in livelier communication than is held in the servants’ hall or at the
Dedlock Arms, or may even beguile the time by improving (perhaps
corrupting) the pony in the loose-box in the corner.
So the mastiff, dozing in his kennel in the court-yard with his
large head on his paws, may think of the hot sunshine when the
shadows of the stable-buildings tire his patience out by changing and
leave him at one time of the day no broader refuge than the shadow
of his own house, where he sits on end, panting and growling short,
and very much wanting something to worry besides himself and his
chain. So now, half-waking and all-winking, he may recall the house
full of company, the coach-houses full of vehicles, the stables fall of
horses, and the out-buildings full of attendants upon horses, until he
is undecided about the present and comes forth to see how it is.
Then, with that impatient shake of himself, he may growl in the
spirit, “Rain, rain, rain! Nothing but rain—and no family here!” as
he goes in again and lies down with a gloomy yawn.
So with the dogs in the kennel-buildings across the park, who
have their resfless fits and whose doleful voices when the wind has
been very obstinate have even made it known in the house itself—
upstairs, downstairs, and in my Lady’s chamber. They may hunt the
whole country-side, while the raindrops are pattering round their
inactivity. So the rabbits with their self-betraying tails, frisking in
and out of holes at roots of trees, may be lively with ideas of the
breezy days when their ears are blown about or of those seasons of
interest when there are sweet young plants to gnaw. The turkey in
the poultry-yard, always troubled with a class-grievance (probably
Christmas), may be reminiscent of that summer morning wrong-
fully taken from him when he got into the lane among the felled
trees, where there was a barn and barley. The discontented goose,
who stoops to pass under the old gateway, twenty feet high, may
gabble out, if we only knew it, a waddling preference for weather
when the gateway casts its shadow on the ground.
Be this as it may, there is not much fancy otherwise stirring at
Chesney Wold. If there be a little at any odd moment, it goes, like a
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little noise in that old echoing place, a long way and usually leads off
to ghosts and mystery.
It has rained so hard and rained so long down in Lincolnshire that
Mrs. Rouncewell, the old housekeeper at Chesney Wold, has several
times taken off her spectacles and cleaned them to make certain that
the drops were not upon the glasses. Mrs. Rouncewell might have
been sufficiently assured by hearing the rain, but that she is rather
deaf, which nothing will induce her to believe. She is a fine old lady,
handsome, stately, wonderfully neat, and has such a back and such a
stomacher that if her stays should turn out when she dies to have
been a broad old-fashioned family fire-grate,
nobody who knows her would have cause to be surprised. Weather
affects Mrs. Rouncewell little. The house is there in all weathers, and
the house, as she expresses it, “is what she looks at.” She sits in her
room (in a side passage on the ground floor, with an arched window
commanding a smooth quadrangle, adorned at regular intervals with
smooth round trees and smooth round blocks of stone, as if the trees
were going to play at bowls with the stones), and the whole house
reposes on her mind. She can open it on occasion and be busy and
fluttered, but it is shut up now and lies on the breadth of Mrs.
Rouncewell’s iron-bound bosom in a majestic sleep.
It is the next difficult thing to an impossibility to imagine
Chesney Wold without Mrs. Rouncewell, but she has only been here
fifty years. Ask her how long, this rainy day, and she shall answer
“fifty year, three months, and a fortnight, by the blessing of heaven,
if I live till Tuesday.” Mr. Rouncewell died some time before the
decease of the pretty fashion of pig-tails, and modestly hid his own
(if he took it with him) in a corner of the churchyard in the park near
the mouldy porch. He was born in the market-town, and so was his
young widow. Her progress in the family began in the time of the
last Sir Leicester and originated in the still-room.
The present representative of the Dedlocks is an excellent master.
He supposes all his dependents to be utterly bereft of individual char-
acters, intentions, or opinions, and is persuaded that he was born to
supersede the necessity of their having any. If he were to make a discov-
ery to the contrary, he would be simply stunned—would never recover
himself, most likely, except to gasp and die. But he is an excellent
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master still, holding it a part of his state to be so. He has a great liking
for Mrs. Rouncewell; he says she is a most respectable, creditable woman.
He always shakes hands with her when he comes down to Chesney
Wold and when he goes away; and if he were very ill, or if he were
knocked down by accident, or run over, or placed in any situation
expressive of a Dedlock at a disadvantage, he would say if he could
speak, “Leave me, and send Mrs. Rouncewell here!” feeling his dignity,
at such a pass, safer with her than with anybody else.
Mrs. Rouncewell has known trouble. She has had two sons, of
whom the younger ran wild, and went for a soldier, and never came
back. Even to this hour, Mrs. Rouncewell’s calm hands lose their
composure when she speaks of him, and unfolding themselves from
her stomacher, hover about her in an agitated manner as she says
what a likely lad, what a fine lad, what a gay, good-humoured, clever
lad he was! Her second son would have been provided for at Chesney
Wold and would have been made steward in due season, but he took,
when he was a schoolboy, to constructing steam-engines out of sauce-
pans and setting birds to draw their own water with the least possible
amount of labour, so assisting them with artful contrivance of hy-
draulic pressure that a thirsty canary had only, in a literal sense, to put
his shoulder to the wheel and the job was done. This propensity gave
Mrs. Rouncewell great uneasiness. She felt it with a mother’s anguish
to be a move in the Wat Tyler direction, well knowing that Sir Le-
icester had that general impression of an aptitude for any art to which
smoke and a tall chimney might be considered essential. But the
doomed young rebel (otherwise a mild youth, and very persevering),
showing no sign of grace as he got older but, on the contrary, con-
structing a model of a power-loom, she was fain, with many tears, to
mention his backslidings to the baronet. “Mrs. Rouncewell,” said Sir
Leicester, “I can never consent to argue, as you know, with any one
on any subject. You had better get rid of your boy; you had better get
him into some Works. The iron country farther north is, I suppose,
the congenial direction for a boy with these tendencies.” Farther north
he went, and farther north he grew up; and if Sir Leicester Dedlock
ever saw him when he came to Chesney Wold to visit his mother, or
ever thought of him afterwards, it is certain that he only regarded
him as one of a body of some odd thousand conspirators, swarthy
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and grim, who were in the habit of turning out by torchlight two or
three nights in the week for unlawful purposes.
Nevertheless, Mrs. Rouncewell’s son has, in the course of nature
and art, grown up, and established himself, and married, and called
unto him Mrs. Rouncewell’s grandson, who, being out of his ap-
prenticeship, and home from a journey in far countries, whither he
was sent to enlarge his knowledge and complete his preparations for
the venture of this life, stands leaning against the chimney-piece this
very day in Mrs. Rouncewell’s room at Chesney Wold.
“And, again and again, I am glad to see you, Watt! And, once again, I am
glad to see you, Watt!” says Mrs. Rouncewell. “You are a fine young fellow.
You are like your poor uncle George. Ah!” Mrs. Rouncewell’s hands un-
quiet, as usual, on this reference.
“They say I am like my father, grandmother.”
“Like him, also, my dear—but most like your poor uncle George!
And your dear father.” Mrs. Rouncewell folds her hands again. “He
is well?”
“Thriving, grandmother, in every way.”
“I am thankful!” Mrs. Rouncewell is fond of her son but has a
plaintive feeling towards him, much as if he were a very honourable
soldier who had gone over to the enemy.
“He is quite happy?” says she.
“Quite.”
“I am thankful! So he has brought you up to follow in his ways
and has sent you into foreign countries and the like? Well, he knows
best. There may be a world beyond Chesney Wold that I don’t un-
derstand. Though I am not young, either. And I have seen a quantity
of good company too!”
“Grandmother,” says the young man, changing the subject, “what
a very pretty girl that was I found with you just now. You called her
Rosa?”
“Yes, child. She is daughter of a widow in the village. Maids are so
hard to teach, now-a-days, that I have put her about me young. She’s
an apt scholar and will do well. She shows the house already, very
pretty. She lives with me at my table here.”
“I hope I have not driven her away?”
“She supposes we have family affairs to speak about, I dare say.
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“The picture over the fire-place,” says Rosa, “is the portrait of the
present Lady Dedlock. It is considered a perfect likeness, and the best
work of the master.”
“‘Blest,” says Mr. Guppy, staring in a kind of dismay at his friend,
“if I can ever have seen her. Yet I know her! Has the picture been
engraved, miss?”
“The picture has never been engraved. Sir Leicester has always re-
fused permission.”
“Well!” says Mr. Guppy in a low voice. “I’ll be shot if it ain’t very
curious how well I know that picture! So that’s Lady Dedlock, is it!”
“The picture on the right is the present Sir Leicester Dedlock. The
picture on the left is his father, the late Sir Leicester.”
Mr. Guppy has no eyes for either of these magnates. “It’s
unaccountable to me,” he says, still staring at the portrait, “how well
I know that picture! I’m dashed,” adds Mr. Guppy, looking round,
“if I don’t think I must have had a dream of that picture, you know!”
As no one present takes any especial interest in Mr. Guppy’s
dreams, the probability is not pursued. But he still remains so ab-
sorbed by the portrait that he stands immovable before it until the
young gardener has closed the shutters, when he comes out of the
room in a dazed state that is an odd though a sufficient substitute for
interest and follows into the succeeding rooms with a confused stare,
as if he were looking everywhere for Lady Dedlock again.
He sees no more of her. He sees her rooms, which are the last shown,
as being very elegant, and he looks out of the windows from which she
looked out, not long ago, upon the weather that bored her to death.
All things have an end, even houses that people take infinite pains to
see and are tired of before they begin to see them. He has come to the
end of the sight, and the fresh village beauty to the end of her descrip-
tion; which is always this: “The terrace below is much admired. It is
called, from an old story in the family, the Ghost’s Walk.”
“No?” says Mr. Guppy, greedily curious. “What’s the story, miss?
Is it anything about a picture?”
“Pray tell us the story,” says Watt in a half whisper.
“I don’t know it, sir.” Rosa is shyer than ever.
“It is not related to visitors; it is almost forgotten,” says the house-
keeper, advancing. “It has never been more than a family anecdote.”
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They were not well suited to each other in age or character, and they had
no children to moderate between them. After her favourite brother, a
young gentleman, was killed in the civil wars (by Sir Morbury’s near
kinsman), her feeling was so violent that she hated the race into which
she had married. When the Dedlocks were about to ride out from Chesney
Wold in the king’s cause, she is supposed to have more than once stolen
down into the stables in the dead of night and lamed their horses; and
the story is that once at such an hour, her husband saw her gliding down
the stairs and followed her into the stall where his own favourite horse
stood. There he seized her by the wrist, and in a struggle or in a fall or
through the horse being frightened and lashing out, she was lamed in the
hip and from that hour began to pine away.”
The housekeeper has dropped her voice to a little more than a
whisper.
“She had been a lady of a handsome figure and a noble carriage. She
never complained of the change; she never spoke to any one of being
crippled or of being in pain, but day by day she tried to walk upon the
terrace, and with the help of the stone balustrade, went up and down,
up and down, up and down, in sun and shadow, with greater difficulty
every day. At last, one afternoon her husband (to whom she had never,
on any persuasion, opened her lips since that night), standing at the
great south window, saw her drop upon the pavement. He hastened
down to raise her, but she repulsed him as he bent over her, and look-
ing at him fixedly and coldly, said, ‘I will die here where I have walked.
And I will walk here, though I am in my grave. I will walk here until
the pride of this house is humbled. And when calamity or when dis-
grace is coming to it, let the Dedlocks listen for my step!’
Watt looks at Rosa. Rosa in the deepening gloom looks down
upon the ground, half frightened and half shy.
“There and then she died. And from those days,” says Mrs.
Rouncewell, “the name has come down—the Ghost’s Walk. If the
tread is an echo, it is an echo that is only heard after dark, and is often
unheard for a long while together. But it comes back from time to
time; and so sure as there is sickness or death in the family, it will be
heard then.”
“And disgrace, grandmother—” says Watt.
“Disgrace never comes to Chesney Wold,” returns the housekeeper.
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CHAPTER VIII
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excuse me; I really cannot attend to the shop! I find myself in a world
in which there is so much to see and so short a time to see it in that
I must take the liberty of looking about me and begging to be pro-
vided for by somebody who doesn’t want to look about him.” This
appeared to Mr. Skimpole to be the drone philosophy, and he thought
it a very good philosophy, always supposing the drone to be willing
to be on good terms with the bee, which, so far as he knew, the easy
fellow always was, if the consequential creature would only let him,
and not be so conceited about his honey!
He pursued this fancy with the lightest foot over a variety of ground
and made us all merry, though again he seemed to have as serious a
meaning in what he said as he was capable of having. I left them still
listening to him when I withdrew to attend to my new duties. They
had occupied me for some time, and I was passing through the pas-
sages on my return with my basket of keys on my arm when Mr.
Jarndyce called me into a small room next his bed-chamber, which I
found to be in part a little library of books and papers and in part
quite a little museum of his boots and shoes and hat-boxes.
“Sit down, my dear,” said Mr. Jarndyce. “This, you must know, is
the growlery. When I am out of humour, I come and growl here.”
“You must be here very seldom, sir,” said I.
“Oh, you don’t know me!” he returned. “When I am deceived or
disappointed in—the wind, and it’s easterly, I take refuge here. The
growlery is the best-used room in the house. You are not aware of
half my humours yet. My dear, how you are trembling!”
I could not help it; I tried very hard, but being alone with that
benevolent presence, and meeting his kind eyes, and feeling so happy
and so honoured there, and my heart so full—
I kissed his hand. I don’t know what I said, or even that I spoke.
He was disconcerted and walked to the window; I almost believed
with an intention of jumping out, until he turned and I was reas-
sured by seeing in his eyes what he had gone there to hide. He gently
patted me on the head, and I sat down.
“There! There!” he said. “That’s over. Pooh! Don’t be foolish.”
“It shall not happen again, sir,” I returned, “but at first it is
difficult—”
“Nonsense!” he said. “It’s easy, easy. Why not? I hear of a good
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ies, over and over again, of everything that has accumulated about it in
the way of cartloads of papers (or must pay for them without having
them, which is the usual course, for nobody wants them) and must go
down the middle and up again through such an infernal country-dance
of costs and fees and nonsense and corruption as was never dreamed of
in the wildest visions of a witch’s Sabbath. Equity sends questions to
law, law sends questions back to equity; law finds it can’t do this, eq-
uity finds it can’t do that; neither can so much as say it can’t do any-
thing, without this solicitor instructing and this counsel appearing for
A, and that solicitor instructing and that counsel appearing for B; and
so on through the whole alphabet, like the history of the apple pie.
And thus, through years and years, and lives and lives, everything goes
on, constantly beginning over and over again, and nothing ever ends.
And we can’t get out of the suit on any terms, for we are made parties
to it, and must be parties to it, whether we like it or not. But it won’t
do to think of it! When my great uncle, poor Tom Jarndyce, began to
think of it, it was the beginning of the end!”
“The Mr. Jarndyce, sir, whose story I have heard?”
He nodded gravely. “I was his heir, and this was his house,
Esther. When I came here, it was bleak indeed. He had left the signs
of his misery upon it.”
“How changed it must be now!” I said.
“It had been called, before his time, the Peaks. He gave it its present
name and lived here shut up, day and night poring over the wicked
heaps of papers in the suit and hoping against hope to disentangle it
from its mystification and bring it to a close. In the meantime, the
place became dilapidated, the wind whistled through the cracked
walls, the rain fell through the broken roof, the weeds choked the
passage to the rotting door. When I brought what remained of him
home here, the brains seemed to me to have been blown out of the
house too, it was so shattered and ruined.”
He walked a little to and fro after saying this to himself with a
shudder, and then looked at me, and brightened, and came and sat
down again with his hands in his pockets.
“I told you this was the growlery, my dear. Where was I?”
I reminded him, at the hopeful change he had made in Bleak House.
“Bleak House; true. There is, in that city of London there, some
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property of ours which is much at this day what Bleak House was
then; I say property of ours, meaning of the suit’s, but I ought to call
it the property of costs, for costs is the only power on earth that will
ever get anything out of it now or will ever know it for anything but
an eyesore and a heartsore. It is a street of perishing blind houses,
with their eyes stoned out, without a pane of glass, without so much
as a window-frame, with the bare blank shutters tumbling from their
hinges and falling asunder, the iron rails peeling away in flakes of
rust, the chimneys sinking in, the stone steps to every door (and
every door might be death’s door) turning stagnant green, the very
crutches on which the ruins are propped decaying. Although Bleak
House was not in Chancery, its master was, and it was stamped with
the same seal. These are the Great Seal’s impressions, my dear, all
over England—the children know them!”
“How changed it is!” I said again.
“Why, so it is,” he answered much more cheerfully; “and it is wis-
dom in you to keep me to the bright side of the picture.” (The idea
of my wisdom!) “These are things I never talk about or even think
about, excepting in the growlery here. If you consider it right to
mention them to Rick and Ada,” looking seriously at me, “you can.
I leave it to your discretion, Esther.”
“I hope, sir—” said I.
“I think you had better call me guardian, my dear.”
I felt that I was choking again—I taxed myself with it, “Esther,
now, you know you are!”—when he feigned to say this slightly, as if
it were a whim instead of a thoughtful tenderness. But I gave the
housekeeping keys the least shake in the world as a reminder to my-
self, and folding my hands in a still more determined manner on the
basket, looked at him quietly.
“I hope, guardian,” said I, “that you may not trust too much to
my discretion. I hope you may not mistake me. I am afraid it will be
a disappointment to you to know that I am not clever, but it really is
the truth, and you would soon find it out if I had not the honesty to
confess it.”
He did not seem at all disappointed; quite the contrary. He told
me, with a smile all over his face, that he knew me very well indeed
and that I was quite clever enough for him.
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“I hope I may turn out so,” said I, “but I am much afraid of it,
guardian.”
“You are clever enough to be the good little woman of our lives
here, my dear,” he returned playfully; “the little old woman of the
child’s (I don’t mean Skimpole’s) rhyme:
You will sweep them so neatly out of our sky in the course of your
housekeeping, Esther, that one of these days we shall have to aban-
don the growlery and nail up the door.”
This was the beginning of my being called Old Woman, and Little
Old Woman, and Cobweb, and Mrs. Shipton, and Mother Hubbard,
and Dame Durden, and so many names of that sort that my own
name soon became quite lost among them.
“However,” said Mr. Jarndyce, “to return to our gossip. Here’s Rick,
a fine young fellow full of promise. What’s to be done with him?”
Oh, my goodness, the idea of asking my advice on such a point!
“Here he is, Esther,” said Mr. Jarndyce, comfortably putting his
hands into his pockets and stretching out his legs. “He must have a
profession; he must make some choice for himself. There will be a
world more wiglomeration about it, I suppose, but it must be done.”
“More what, guardian?” said I.
“More wiglomeration,” said he. “It’s the only name I know for the
thing. He is a ward in Chancery, my dear. Kenge and Carboy will have
something to say about it; Master Somebody—a sort of ridiculous
sexton, digging graves for the merits of causes in a back room at the
end of Quality Court, Chancery Lane—will have something to say
about it; counsel will have something to say about it; the Chancellor
will have something to say about it; the satellites will have something
to say about it; they will all have to be handsomely feed, all round,
about it; the whole thing will be vastly ceremonious, wordy, unsatis-
factory, and expensive, and I call it, in general, wiglomeration. How
mankind ever came to be afflicted with wiglomeration, or for whose
sins these young people ever fell into a pit of it, I don’t know; so it is.”
He began to rub his head again and to hint that he felt the wind.
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after what I had been thinking, it must have been expressed in the
colour of my cheeks.
“Found out, I mean,” said Mrs. Pardiggle, “the prominent point
in my character. I am aware that it is so prominent as to be discover-
able immediately. I lay myself open to detection, I know. Well! I
freely admit, I am a woman of business. I love hard work; I enjoy
hard work. The excitement does me good. I am so accustomed and
inured to hard work that I don’t know what fatigue is.”
We murmured that it was very astonishing and very gratifying, or
something to that effect. I don’t think we knew what it was either,
but this is what our politeness expressed.
“I do not understand what it is to be tired; you cannot tire me if
you try!” said Mrs. Pardiggle. “The quantity of exertion (which is no
exertion to me), the amount of business (which I regard as nothing),
that I go through sometimes astonishes myself. I have seen my young
family, and Mr. Pardiggle, quite worn out with witnessing it, when I
may truly say I have been as fresh as a lark!”
If that dark-visaged eldest boy could look more malicious than he
had already looked, this was the time when he did it. I observed that he
doubled his right fist and delivered a secret blow into the crown of his
cap, which was under his left arm.
“This gives me a great advantage when I am making my rounds,”
said Mrs. Pardiggle. “If I find a person unwilling to hear what I have
to say, I tell that person directly, ‘I am incapable of fatigue, my good
friend, I am never tired, and I mean to go on until I have done.’ It
answers admirably! Miss Summerson, I hope I shall have your assis-
tance in my visiting rounds immediately, and Miss Clare’s very soon.”
At first I tried to excuse myself for the present on the general ground
of having occupations to attend to which I must not neglect. But as
this was an ineffectual protest, I then said, more particularly, that I was
not sure of my qualifications. That I was inexperienced in the art of
adapting my mind to minds very differently situated, and addressing
them from suitable points of view. That I had not that delicate knowl-
edge of the heart which must be essential to such a work. That I had
much to learn, myself, before I could teach others, and that I could not
confide in my good intentions alone. For these reasons I thought it
best to be as useful as I could, and to render what kind services I could
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to those immediately about me, and to try to let that circle of duty
gradually and naturally expand itself. All this I said with anything but
confidence, because Mrs. Pardiggle was much older than I, and had
great experience, and was so very military in her manners.
“You are wrong, Miss Summerson,” said she, “but perhaps you are
not equal to hard work or the excitement of it, and that makes a vast
difference. If you would like to see how I go through my work, I am
now about—with my young family—to visit a brickmaker in the
neighbourhood (a very bad character) and shall be glad to take you
with me. Miss Clare also, if she will do me the favour.”
Ada and I interchanged looks, and as we were going out in any
case, accepted the offer. When we hastily returned from putting on
our bonnets, we found the young family languishing in a corner and
Mrs. Pardiggle sweeping about the room, knocking down nearly all
the light objects it contained. Mrs. Pardiggle took possession of Ada,
and I followed with the family.
Ada told me afterwards that Mrs. Pardiggle talked in the same
loud tone (that, indeed, I overheard) all the way to the brickmaker’s
about an exciting contest which she had for two or three years waged
against another lady relative to the bringing in of their rival candi-
dates for a pension somewhere. There had been a quantity of print-
ing, and promising, and proxying, and polling, and it appeared to
have imparted great liveliness to all concerned, except the pension-
ers—who were not elected yet.
I am very fond of being confided in by children and am happy in
being usually favoured in that respect, but on this occasion it gave
me great uneasiness. As soon as we were out of doors, Egbert, with
the manner of a little footpad, demanded a shilling of me on the ground
that his pocket-money was “boned” from him. On my pointing out
the great impropriety of the word, especially in connexion with his
parent (for he added sulkily “By her!”), he pinched me and said, “Oh,
then! Now! Who are you! You wouldn’t like it, I think? What does she
make a sham for, and pretend to give me money, and take it away
again? Why do you call it my allowance, and never let me spend it?”
These exasperating questions so inflamed his mind and the minds of
Oswald and Francis that they all pinched me at once, and in a dread-
fully expert way—screwing up such little pieces of my arms that I
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could hardly forbear crying out. Felix, at the same time, stamped upon
my toes. And the Bond of Joy, who on account of always having the
whole of his little income anticipated stood in fact pledged to abstain
from cakes as well as tobacco, so swelled with grief and rage when we
passed a pastry-cook’s shop that he terrified me by becoming purple. I
never underwent so much, both in body and mind, in the course of a
walk with young people as from these unnaturally constrained chil-
dren when they paid me the compliment of being natural.
I was glad when we came to the brickmaker’s house, though it was
one of a cluster of wretched hovels in a brick-field, with pigsties close
to the broken windows and miserable little gardens before the doors
growing nothing but stagnant pools. Here and there an old tub was
put to catch the droppings of rain-water from a roof, or they were
banked up with mud into a little pond like a large dirt-pie. At the
doors and windows some men and women lounged or prowled
about, and took little notice of us except to laugh to one another or
to say something as we passed about gentlefolks minding their own
business and not troubling their heads and muddying their shoes
with coming to look after other people’s.
Mrs. Pardiggle, leading the way with a great show of moral
determination and talking with much volubility about the untidy
habits of the people (though I doubted if the best of us could have
been tidy in such a place), conducted us into a cottage at the farthest
corner, the ground-floor room of which we nearly filled. Besides
ourselves, there were in this damp, offensive room a woman with a
black eye, nursing a poor little gasping baby by the fire; a man, all
stained with clay and mud and looking very dissipated, lying at full
length on the ground, smoking a pipe; a powerful young man fas-
tening a collar on a dog; and a bold girl doing some kind of washing
in very dirty water. They all looked up at us as we came in, and the
woman seemed to turn her face towards the fire as if to hide her
bruised eye; nobody gave us any welcome.
“Well, my friends,” said Mrs. Pardiggle, but her voice had not a
friendly sound, I thought; it was much too businesslike and system-
atic. “How do you do, all of you? I am here again. I told you, you
couldn’t tire me, you know. I am fond of hard work, and am true to
my word.”
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“There an’t,” growled the man on the floor, whose head rested on
his hand as he stared at us, “any more on you to come in, is there?”
“No, my friend,” said Mrs. Pardiggle, seating herself on one stool
and knocking down another. “We are all here.”
“Because I thought there warn’t enough of you, perhaps?” said the
man, with his pipe between his lips as he looked round upon us.
The young man and the girl both laughed. Two friends of the
young man, whom we had attracted to the doorway and who stood
there with their hands in their pockets, echoed the laugh noisily.
“You can’t tire me, good people,” said Mrs. Pardiggle to these lat-
ter. “I enjoy hard work, and the harder you make mine, the better I
like it.”
“Then make it easy for her!” growled the man upon the floor. “I
wants it done, and over. I wants a end of these liberties took with my
place. I wants an end of being drawed like a badger. Now you’re a-
going to poll-pry and question according to custom—I know what
you’re a-going to be up to. Well! You haven’t got no occasion to be
up to it. I’ll save you the trouble. Is my daughter a-washin? Yes, she is
a-washin. Look at the water. Smell it! That’s wot we drinks. How do
you like it, and what do you think of gin instead! An’t my place
dirty? Yes, it is dirty—it’s nat’rally dirty, and it’s nat’rally onwholesome;
and we’ve had five dirty and onwholesome children, as is all dead
infants, and so much the better for them, and for us besides. Have I
read the little book wot you left? No, I an’t read the little book wot
you left. There an’t nobody here as knows how to read it; and if there
wos, it wouldn’t be suitable to me. It’s a book fit for a babby, and
I’m not a babby. If you was to leave me a doll, I shouldn’t nuss it.
How have I been conducting of myself? Why, I’ve been drunk for
three days; and I’da been drunk four if I’da had the money. Don’t I
never mean for to go to church? No, I don’t never mean for to go to
church. I shouldn’t be expected there, if I did; the beadle’s too gen-
teel for me. And how did my wife get that black eye? Why, I give it
her; and if she says I didn’t, she’s a lie!”
He had pulled his pipe out of his mouth to say all this, and he
now turned over on his other side and smoked again. Mrs. Pardiggle,
who had been regarding him through her spectacles with a forcible
composure, calculated, I could not help thinking, to increase his an-
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She supposed that we were following her, but as soon as the space
was left clear, we approached the woman sitting by the fire to ask if
the baby were ill.
She only looked at it as it lay on her lap. We had observed before that
when she looked at it she covered her discoloured eye with her hand, as
though she wished to separate any association with noise and violence and ill
treatment from the poor little child.
Ada, whose gentle heart was moved by its appearance, bent down
to touch its little face. As she did so, I saw what happened and drew
her back. The child died.
“Oh, Esther!” cried Ada, sinking on her knees beside it. “Look
here! Oh, Esther, my love, the little thing! The suffering, quiet, pretty
little thing! I am so sorry for it. I am so sorry for the mother. I never
saw a sight so pitiful as this before! Oh, baby, baby!”
Such compassion, such gentleness, as that with which she bent
down weeping and put her hand upon the mother’s might have soft-
ened any mother’s heart that ever beat. The woman at first gazed at
her in astonishment and then burst into tears.
Presently I took the light burden from her lap, did what I could to
make the baby’s rest the prettier and gentler, laid it on a shelf, and
covered it with my own handkerchief. We tried to comfort the
mother, and we whispered to her what Our Saviour said of children.
She answered nothing, but sat weeping—weeping very much.
When I turned, I found that the young man had taken out the dog
and was standing at the door looking in upon us with dry eyes, but
quiet. The girl was quiet too and sat in a corner looking on the ground.
The man had risen. He still smoked his pipe with an air of defiance,
but he was silent.
An ugly woman, very poorly clothed, hurried in while I was glanc-
ing at them, and coming straight up to the mother, said, “Jenny!
Jenny!” The mother rose on being so addressed and fell upon the
woman’s neck.
She also had upon her face and arms the marks of ill usage. She
had no kind of grace about her, but the grace of sympathy; but when
she condoled with the woman, and her own tears fell, she wanted no
beauty. I say condoled, but her only words were “Jenny! Jenny!” All
the rest was in the tone in which she said them.
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As she gave way for us, she went softly in and put what we had brought
near the miserable bed on which the mother slept. No effort had been
made to clean the room—it seemed in its nature almost hopeless of
being clean; but the small waxen form from which so much solemnity
diffused itself had been composed afresh, and washed, and neatly dressed
in some fragments of white linen; and on my handkerchief, which still
covered the poor baby, a little bunch of sweet herbs had been laid by the
same rough, scarred hands, so lightly, so tenderly!
“May heaven reward you!” we said to her. “You are a good woman.”
“Me, young ladies?” she returned with surprise. “Hush! Jenny,
Jenny!”
The mother had moaned in her sleep and moved. The sound of
the familiar voice seemed to calm her again. She was quiet once more.
How little I thought, when I raised my handkerchief to look upon
the tiny sleeper underneath and seemed to see a halo shine around the
child through Ada’s drooping hair as her pity bent her head—how
little I thought in whose unquiet bosom that handkerchief would
come to lie after covering the motionless and peaceful breast! I only
thought that perhaps the Angel of the child might not be all uncon-
scious of the woman who replaced it with so compassionate a hand;
not all unconscious of her presently, when we had taken leave, and
left her at the door, by turns looking, and listening in terror for her-
self, and saying in her old soothing manner, “Jenny, Jenny!”
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CHAPTER IX
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relied more and more upon me as they took more and more to one
another was so charming that I had great difficulty in not showing
how it interested me.
“Our dear little old woman is such a capital old woman,” Richard would
say, coming up to meet me in the garden early, with his pleasant laugh and
perhaps the least tinge of a blush, “that I can’t get on without her. Before I
begin my harum-scarum day—grinding away at those books and instru-
ments and then galloping up hill and down dale, all the country round,
like a highwayman—it does me so much good to come and have a steady
walk with our comfortable friend, that here I am again!”
“You know, Dame Durden, dear,” Ada would say at night, with
her head upon my shoulder and the firelight shining in her thought-
ful eyes, “I don’t want to talk when we come upstairs here. Only to
sit a little while thinking, with your dear face for company, and to
hear the wind and remember the poor sailors at sea—”
Ah! Perhaps Richard was going to be a sailor. We had talked it over
very often now, and there was some talk of gratifying the inclination
of his childhood for the sea. Mr. Jarndyce had written to a relation of
the family, a great Sir Leicester Dedlock, for his interest in Richard’s
favour, generally; and Sir Leicester had replied in a gracious manner
that he would be happy to advance the prospects of the young gentle-
man if it should ever prove to be within his power, which was not at
all probable, and that my Lady sent her compliments to the young
gentleman (to whom she perfectly remembered that she was allied
by remote consanguinity) and trusted that he would ever do his duty
in any honourable profession to which he might devote himself.
“So I apprehend it’s pretty clear,” said Richard to me, “that I shall
have to work my own way. Never mind! Plenty of people have had
to do that before now, and have done it. I only wish I had the com-
mand of a clipping privateer to begin with and could carry off the
Chancellor and keep him on short allowance until he gave judgment
in our cause. He’d find himself growing thin, if he didn’t look sharp!”
With a buoyancy and hopefulness and a gaiety that hardly ever flagged,
Richard had a carelessness in his character that quite perplexed me, princi-
pally because he mistook it, in such a very odd way, for prudence. It en-
tered into all his calculations about money in a singular manner which I
don’t think I can better explain than by reverting for a moment to our loan
to Mr. Skimpole.
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shyly thinking that this love was the greatest of secrets, perhaps not yet
suspected even by the other—I am sure that I was scarcely less en-
chanted than they were and scarcely less pleased with the pretty dream.
We were going on in this way, when one morning at breakfast Mr.
Jarndyce received a letter, and looking at the superscription, said,
“From Boythorn? Aye, aye!” and opened and read it with evident
pleasure, announcing to us in a parenthesis when he was about half-
way through, that Boythorn was “coming down” on a visit. Now
who was Boythorn, we all thought. And I dare say we all thought
too—I am sure I did, for one—would Boythorn at all interfere with
what was going forward?
“I went to school with this fellow, Lawrence Boythorn,” said Mr.
Jarndyce, tapping the letter as he laid it on the table, “more than five
and forty years ago. He was then the most impetuous boy in the
world, and he is now the most impetuous man. He was then the
loudest boy in the world, and he is now the loudest man. He was
then the heartiest and sturdiest boy in the world, and he is now the
heartiest and sturdiest man. He is a tremendous fellow.”
“In stature, sir?” asked Richard.
“Pretty well, Rick, in that respect,” said Mr. Jarndyce; “being some
ten years older than I and a couple of inches taller, with his head thrown
back like an old soldier, his stalwart chest squared, his hands like a clean
blacksmith’s, and his lungs! There’s no simile for his lungs. Talking,
laughing, or snoring, they make the beams of the house shake.”
As Mr. Jarndyce sat enjoying the image of his friend Boythorn, we
observed the favourable omen that there was not the least indication
of any change in the wind.
“But it’s the inside of the man, the warm heart of the man, the
passion of the man, the fresh blood of the man, Rick—and Ada, and
little Cobweb too, for you are all interested in a visitor—that I speak
of,” he pursued. “His language is as sounding as his voice. He is
always in extremes, perpetually in the superlative degree. In his con-
demnation he is all ferocity. You might suppose him to be an ogre
from what he says, and I believe he has the reputation of one with
some people. There! I tell you no more of him beforehand. You
must not be surprised to see him take me under his protection, for
he has never forgotten that I was a low boy at
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nomenon. And his father before him was one of the most astonish-
ing birds that ever lived!”
The subject of this laudation was a very little canary, who was so
tame that he was brought down by Mr. Boythorn’s man, on his
forefinger, and after taking a gentle flight round the room, alighted
on his master’s head. To hear Mr. Boythorn presently expressing the
most implacable and passionate sentiments, with this fragile mite of
a creature quietly perched on his forehead, was to have a good illus-
tration of his character, I thought.
“By my soul, Jarndyce,” he said, very gently holding up a bit of
bread to the canary to peck at, “if I were in your place I would seize
every master in Chancery by the throat tomorrow morning and shake
him until his money rolled out of his pockets and his bones rattled
in his skin. I would have a settlement out of somebody, by fair means
or by foul. If you would empower me to do it, I would do it for you
with the greatest satisfaction!” (All this time the very small canary
was eating out of his hand.)
“I thank you, Lawrence, but the suit is hardly at such a point at present,”
returned Mr. Jarndyce, laughing, “that it would be greatly advanced even
by the legal process of shaking the bench and the whole bar.”
“There never was such an infernal cauldron as that Chancery on the
face of the earth!” said Mr. Boythorn. “Nothing but a mine below it
on a busy day in term time, with all its records, rules, and precedents
collected in it and every functionary belonging to it also, high and low,
upward and downward, from its son the Accountant-General to its
father the Devil, and the whole blown to atoms with ten thousand
hundredweight of gunpowder, would reform it in the least!”
It was impossible not to laugh at the energetic gravity with which
he recommended this strong measure of reform. When we laughed,
he threw up his head and shook his broad chest, and again the whole
country seemed to echo to his “Ha, ha, ha!” It had not the least effect
in disturbing the bird, whose sense of security was complete and
who hopped about the table with its quick head now on this side
and now on that, turning its bright sudden eye on its master as if he
were no more than another bird.
“But how do you and your neighbour get on about the disputed
right of way?” said Mr. Jarndyce. “You are not free from the toils of
the law yourself!”
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“The fellow has brought actions against me for trespass, and I have
brought actions against him for trespass,” returned Mr. Boythorn.
“By heaven, he is the proudest fellow breathing. It is morally impos-
sible that his name can be Sir Leicester. It must be Sir Lucifer.”
“Complimentary to our distant relation!” said my guardian laugh-
ingly to Ada and Richard.
“I would beg Miss Clare’s pardon and Mr. Carstone’s pardon,”
resumed our visitor, “if I were not reassured by seeing in the fair face
of the lady and the smile of the gentleman that it is quite unnecessary
and that they keep their distant relation at a comfortable distance.”
“Or he keeps us,” suggested Richard.
“By my soul,” exclaimed Mr. Boythorn, suddenly firing another
volley, “that fellow is, and his father was, and his grandfather was, the
most stiff-necked, arrogant imbecile, pig-headed numskull, ever, by
some inexplicable mistake of Nature, born in any station of life but
a walking-stick’s! The whole of that family are the most solemnly
conceited and consummate blockheads! But it’s no matter; he should
not shut up my path if he were fifty baronets melted into one and
living in a hundred Chesney Wolds, one within another, like the
ivory balls in a Chinese carving. The fellow, by his agent, or secretary,
or somebody, writes to me ‘Sir Leicester
Dedlock, Baronet, presents his compliments to Mr. Lawrence
Boythorn, and has to call his attention to the fact that the green
pathway by the old parsonage-house, now the property of Mr.
Lawrence Boythorn, is Sir Leicester’s right of way, being in fact a
portion of the park of chesney Wold, and that Sir Leicester finds it
convenient to close up the same.’ I write to the fellow, ‘Mr. Lawrence
Boythorn presents his compliments to Sir Leicester Dedlock, Bar-
onet, and has to call his attention to the fact that he totally denies the
whole of Sir Leicester Dedlock’s positions on every possible subject
and has to add, in reference to closing up the pathway, that he will be
glad to see the man who may undertake
to do it.’ The fellow sends a most abandoned villain with one eye to
construct a gateway. I play upon that execrable scoundrel with a fire-
engine until the breath is nearly driven out of his body. The fellow
erects a gate in the night. I chop it down and burn it in the morning.
He sends his myrmidons to come over the fence and pass and repass.
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I catch them in humane man traps, fire split peas at their legs, play
upon them with the engine—resolve to free mankind from the in-
supportable burden of the existence of those lurking ruffians. He
brings actions for trespass; I bring actions for trespass. He brings
actions for assault and battery; I defend them and continue to assault
and batter. Ha, ha, ha!”
To hear him say all this with unimaginable energy, one might have
thought him the angriest of mankind. To see him at the very same
time, looking at the bird now perched upon his thumb and softly
smoothing its feathers with his forefinger, one might have thought
him the gentlest. To hear him laugh and see the broad good nature of
his face then, one might have supposed that he had not a care in the
world, or a dispute, or a dislike, but that his whole existence was a
summer joke.
“No, no,” he said, “no closing up of my paths by any Dedlock!
Though I willingly confess,” here he softened in a moment, “that
Lady Dedlock is the most accomplished lady in the world, to whom
I would do any homage that a plain gentleman, and no baronet with
a head seven hundred years thick, may. A man who joined his regi-
ment at twenty and within a week challenged the most imperious
and presumptuous coxcomb of a commanding officer that ever drew
the breath of life through a tight waist—and got broke for it—is not
the man to be walked over by all the Sir Lucifers, dead or alive,
locked or unlocked. Ha, ha, ha!”
“Nor the man to allow his junior to be walked over either?” said
my guardian.
“Most assuredly not!” said Mr. Boythorn, clapping him on the shoul-
der with an air of protection that had something serious in it, though he
laughed. “He will stand by the low boy, always. Jarndyce, you may rely
upon him! But speaking of this trespass—with apologies to Miss Clare
and Miss Summerson for the length at which I have pursued so dry a
subject—is there nothing for me from your men Kenge and Carboy?”
“I think not, Esther?” said Mr. Jarndyce.
“Nothing, guardian.”
“Much obliged!” said Mr. Boythorn. “Had no need to ask, after
even my slight experience of Miss Summerson’s forethought for
every one about her.” (They all encouraged me; they were deter-
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with the graces of youth. But I fell asleep before I had succeeded, and
dreamed of the days when I lived in my godmother’s house. I am not
sufficiently acquainted with such subjects to know whether it is at all
remarkable that I almost always dreamed of that period of my life.
With the morning there came a letter from Messrs. Kenge and Car-
boy to Mr. Boythorn informing him that one of their clerks would
wait upon him at noon. As it was the day of the week on which I paid
the bills, and added up my books, and made all the household affairs
as compact as possible, I remained at home while Mr. Jarndyce, Ada,
and Richard took advantage of a very fine day to make a little excur-
sion, Mr. Boythorn was to wait for Kenge and Carboy’s clerk and then
was to go on foot to meet them on their return.
Well! I was full of business, examining tradesmen’s books, adding
up columns, paying money, filing receipts, and I dare say making a
great bustle about it when Mr. Guppy was announced and shown in. I
had had some idea that the clerk who was to be sent down might be
the young gentleman who had met me at the coach-office, and I was
glad to see him, because he was associated with my present happiness.
I scarcely knew him again, he was so uncommonly smart. He had
an entirely new suit of glossy clothes on, a shining hat, lilac-kid gloves,
a neckerchief of a variety of colours, a large hot-house flower in his
button-hole, and a thick gold ring on his little finger. Besides which,
he quite scented the dining-room with bear’s-grease and other per-
fumery. He looked at me with an attention that quite confused me
when I begged him to take a seat until the servant should return; and
as he sat there crossing and uncrossing his legs in a corner, and I asked
him if he had had a pleasant ride, and hoped that Mr. Kenge was
well, I never looked at him, but I found him looking at me in the
same scrutinizing and curious way.
When the request was brought to him that he would go up-stairs to
Mr. Boythorn’s room, I mentioned that he would find lunch prepared
for him when he came down, of which Mr. Jarndyce hoped he would
partake. He said with some embarrassment, holding the handle of the
door, ‘“Shall I have the honour of finding you here, miss?” I replied
yes, I should be there; and he went out with a bow and another look.
I thought him only awkward and shy, for he was evidently much
embarrassed; and I fancied that the best thing I could do would be to
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wait until I saw that he had everything he wanted and then to leave
him to himself. The lunch was soon brought, but it remained for
some time on the table. The interview with Mr. Boythorn was a
long one, and a stormy one too, I should think, for although his
room was at some distance I heard his loud voice rising every now
and then like a high wind, and evidently blowing perfect broadsides
of denunciation.
At last Mr. Guppy came back, looking something the worse for
the conference. “My eye, miss,” he said in a low voice, “he’s a Tartar!”
“Pray take some refreshment, sir,” said I.
Mr. Guppy sat down at the table and began nervously sharpening
the carving-knife on the carving-fork, still looking at me (as I felt
quite sure without looking at him) in the same unusual manner. The
sharpening lasted so long that at last I felt a kind of obligation on me
to raise my eyes in order that I might break the spell under which he
seemed to labour, of not being able to leave off.
He immediately looked at the dish and began to carve.
“What will you take yourself, miss? You’ll take a morsel of
something?”
“No, thank you,” said I.
“Shan’t I give you a piece of anything at all, miss?” said Mr. Guppy,
hurriedly drinking off a glass of wine.
“Nothing, thank you,” said I. “I have only waited to see that you
have everything you want. Is there anything I can order for you?”
“No, I am much obliged to you, miss, I’m sure. I’ve everything
that I can require to make me comfortable—at least I—not com-
fortable—I’m never that.” He drank off two more glasses of wine,
one after another.
I thought I had better go.
“I beg your pardon, miss!” said Mr. Guppy, rising when he saw me
rise. “But would you allow me the favour of a minute’s private con-
versation?”
Not knowing what to say, I sat down again.
“What follows is without prejudice, miss?” said Mr. Guppy, anx-
iously bringing a chair towards my table.
“I don’t understand what you mean,” said I, wondering.
“It’s one of our law terms, miss. You won’t make any use of it to
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and not much frightened. I said, “Get up from that ridiculous posi-
tion lmmediately, sir, or you will oblige me to break my implied
promise and ring the bell!”
“Hear me out, miss!” said Mr. Guppy, folding his hands.
“I cannot consent to hear another word, sir,” I returned, “Unless you
get up from the carpet directly and go and sit down at the table as you
ought to do if you have any sense at all.”
He looked piteously, but slowly rose and did so.
“Yet what a mockery it is, miss,” he said with his hand upon his
heart and shaking his head at me in a melancholy manner over the
tray, “to be stationed behind food at such a moment. The soul
recoils from food at such a moment, miss.”
“I beg you to conclude,” said I; “you have asked me to hear you
out, and I beg you to conclude.”
“I will, miss,” said Mr. Guppy. “As I love and honour, so likewise
I obey. Would that I could make thee the subject of that vow before
the shrine!”
“That is quite impossible,” said I, “and entirely out of the
question.”
“I am aware,” said Mr. Guppy, leaning forward over the tray
and regarding me, as I again strangely felt, though my eyes were
not directed to him, with his late intent look, “I am aware that in
a worldly point of view, according to all appearances, my offer is
a poor one. But, Miss Summerson! Angel! No, don’t ring—I have
been brought up in a sharp school and am accustomed to a vari-
ety of general practice. Though a young man, I have ferreted out
evidence, got up cases, and seen lots of life. Blest with your hand,
what means might I not find of advancing your interests and push-
ing your fortunes! What might I not get to know, nearly concern-
ing you? I know nothing now, certainly; but what might I not if
I had your confidence, and you set me on?”
I told him that he addressed my interest or what he supposed to be
my interest quite as unsuccessfully as he addressed my inclination,
and he would now understand that I requested him, if he pleased, to
go away immediately.
“Cruel miss,” said Mr. Guppy, “hear but another word! I think
you must have seen that I was struck with those charms on the day
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CHAPTER X
The Law-Writer
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“Certainly, sir! Dear me, sir, why didn’t you send your young man
round for me? Pray walk into the back shop, sir.” Snagsby has bright-
ened in a moment.
The confined room, strong of parchment-grease, is warehouse,
counting-house, and copying-office. Mr. Tulkinghorn sits, facing
round, on a stool at the desk.
“Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Snagsby.”
“Yes, sir.” Mr. Snagsby turns up the gas and coughs behind his
hand, modestly anticipating profit. Mr. Snagsby, as a timid man, is
accustomed to cough with a variety of expressions, and so to save
words.
“You copied some affidavits in that cause for me lately.”
“Yes, sir, we did.”
“There was one of them,” says Mr. Tulkinghorn, carelessly feel-
ing—tight, unopenable oyster of the old school!—in the wrong coat-
pocket, “the handwriting of which is peculiar, and I rather like. As I
happened to be passing, and thought I had it about me, I looked in
to ask you—but I haven’t got it. No matter, any other time will do.
Ah! here it is! I looked in to ask you who copied this.”
‘“Who copied this, sir?” says Mr. Snagsby, taking it, laying it flat
on the desk, and separating all the sheets at once with a twirl and a
twist of the left hand peculiar to lawstationers. “We gave this out,
sir. We were giving out rather a large quantity of work just at that
time. I can tell you in a moment who copied it, sir, by referring to
my book.”
Mr. Snagsby takes his book down from the safe, makes another
bolt of the bit of bread and butter which seemed to have stopped
short, eyes the affidavit aside, and brings his right forefinger travel-
ling down a page of the book, “Jewby—Packer—Jarndyce.”
“Jarndyce! Here we are, sir,” says Mr. Snagsby. “To be sure! I might
have remembered it. This was given out, sir, to a writer who lodges
just over on the opposite side of the lane.”
Mr. Tulkinghorn has seen the entry, found it before the law-statio-
ner, read it while the forefinger was coming down the hill.
“What do you call him? Nemo?” says Mr. Tulkinghorn. “Nemo,
sir. Here it is. Forty-two folio. Given out on the Wednesday night at
eight o’clock, brought in on the Thursday morning at half after nine.”
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Mrs. Snagsby bends to the lawyer, retires behind the counter, peeps
at them through the window-blind, goes softly into the back office,
refers to the entries in the book still lying open. Is evidently curious.
“You will find that the place is rough, sir,” says Mr. Snagsby,
walking deferentially in the road and leaving the narrow pavement to
the lawyer; “and the party is very rough. But they’re a wild lot in
general, sir. The advantage of this particular man is that he never
wants sleep. He’ll go at it right on end if you want him to, as long as
ever you like.”
It is quite dark now, and the gas-lamps have acquired their full
effect. Jostling against clerks going to post the day’s letters, and against
counsel and attorneys going home to dinner, and against plaintiffs
and defendants and suitors of all sorts, and against the general crowd,
in whose way the forensic wisdom of ages has interposed a million of
obstacles to the transaction of the commonest business of life; diving
through law and equity, and through that kindred mystery, the street
mud, which is made of nobody knows what and collects about us
nobody knows whence or how—we only knowing in general that
when there is too much of it we find it necessary to shovel it away—
the lawyer and the law-stationer come to a rag and bottle shop and
general emporium of much disregarded merchandise, lying and be-
ing in the shadow of the wall of Lincoln’s Inn, and kept, as is an-
nounced in paint, to all whom it may concern, by one Krook.
“This is where he lives, sir,” says the law-stationer.
“This is where he lives, is it?” says the lawyer unconcernedly.
“Thank you.”
“Are you not going in, sir?”
“No, thank you, no; I am going on to the Fields at present. Good
evening. Thank you!” Mr. Snagsby lifts his hat and returns to his
little woman and his tea.
But Mr. Tulkinghorn does not go on to the Fields at present. He
goes a short way, turns back, comes again to the shop of Mr. Krook,
and enters it straight. It is dim enough, with a blot-headed candle or
so in the windows, and an old man and a cat sitting in the back part
by a fire. The old man rises and comes forward, with another blot-
headed candle in his hand.
“Pray is your lodger within?”
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CHAPTER XI
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“He has died,” says the surgeon, “of an over-dose of opium, there is no
doubt. The room is strongly flavoured with it. There is enough here
now,” taking an old teapot from Mr. Krook, “to kill a dozen people.”
“Do you think he did it on purpose?” asks Krook.
“Took the over-dose?”
“Yes!” Krook almost smacks his lips with the unction of a horrible
interest.
“I can’t say. I should think it unlikely, as he has been in the habit of
taking so much. But nobody can tell. He was very poor, I suppose?”
“I suppose he was. His room—don’t look rich,” says Krook, who
might have changed eyes with his cat, as he casts his sharp glance
around. “But I have never been in it since he had it, and he was too
close to name his circumstances to me.”
“Did he owe you any rent?”
“Six weeks.”
“He will never pay it!” says the young man, resuming his
examination. “It is beyond a doubt that he is indeed as dead as Pha-
raoh; and to judge from his appearance and condition, I should think
it a happy release. Yet he must have been a good figure when a youth,
and I dare say, good-looking.” He says this, not unfeelingly, while
sitting on the bedstead’s edge with his face towards that other face
and his hand upon the region of the heart. “I recollect once thinking
there was something in his manner, uncouth as it was, that denoted a
fall in life. Was that so?” he continues, looking round.
Krook replies, “You might as well ask me to describe the ladies
whose heads of hair I have got in sacks downstairs. Than that he was
my lodger for a year and a half and lived—or didn’t live—by law-
writing, I know no more of him.”
During this dialogue Mr. Tulkinghorn has stood aloof by the old
portmanteau, with his hands behind him, equally removed, to all
appearance, from all three kinds of interest exhibited near the bed—
from the young surgeon’s professional interest in death, noticeable as
being quite apart from his remarks on the deceased as an individual;
from the old man’s unction; and the little crazy woman’s awe. His
imperturbable face has been as inexpressive as his rusty clothes. One
could not even say he has been thinking all this while. He has shown
neither patience nor impatience, nor attention nor abstraction. He
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has shown nothing but his shell. As easily might the tone of a deli-
cate musical instrument be inferred from its case, as the tone of Mr.
Tulkinghorn from his case.
He now interposes, addressing the young surgeon in his unmoved,
professional way.
“I looked in here,” he observes, “just before you, with the
intention of giving this deceased man, whom I never saw alive, some
employment at his trade of copying. I had heard of him from my
stationer—Snagsby of Cook’s Court. Since no one here knows any-
thing about him, it might be as well to send for Snagsby. Ah!” to the
little crazy woman, who has often seen him in court, and whom he
has often seen, and who proposes, in frightened dumb-show, to go
for the law-stationer. “Suppose you do!”
While she is gone, the surgeon abandons his hopeless investigation
and covers its subject with the patchwork counterpane. Mr. Krook
and he interchange a word or two. Mr. Tulkinghorn says nothing,
but stands, ever, near the old portmanteau.
Mr. Snagsby arrives hastily in his grey coat and his black sleeves. “Dear
me, dear me,” he says; “and it has come to this, has it! Bless my soul!”
“Can you give the person of the house any information about this
unfortunate creature, Snagsby?” inquires Mr. Tulkinghorn. “He was
in arrears with his rent, it seems. And he must be buried, you know.”
“Well, sir,” says Mr. Snagsby, coughing his apologetic cough be-
hind his hand, “I really don’t know what advice I could offer, except
sending for the beadle.”
“I don’t speak of advice,” returns Mr. Tulkinghorn. “I could
advise—”
“No one better, sir, I am sure,” says Mr. Snagsby, with his
deferential cough.
“I speak of affording some clue to his connexions, or to where he
came from, or to anything concerning him.”
“I assure you, sir,” says Mr. Snagsby after prefacing his reply with
his cough of general propitiation, “that I no more know where he
came from than I know—”
“Where he has gone to, perhaps,” suggests the surgeon to help him out.
A pause. Mr. Tulkinghorn looking at the law-stationer. Mr. Krook,
with his mouth open, looking for somebody to speak next.
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“As to his connexions, sir,” says Mr. Snagsby, “if a person was to say
to me, “Snagsby, here’s twenty thousand pound down, ready for you
in the Bank of England if you’ll only name one of ‘em,’ I couldn’t do
it, sir! About a year and a half ago—to the best of my belief, at the time
when he first came to lodge at the present rag and bottle shop—”
“That was the time!” says Krook with a nod.
“About a year and a half ago,” says Mr. Snagsby, strengthened, “he
came into our place one morning after breakfast, and finding my
little woman (which I name Mrs. Snagsby when I use that appella-
tion) in our shop, produced a specimen of his handwriting and gave
her to understand that he was in want of copying work to do and
was, not to put too fine a point upon it,” a favourite apology for
plain speaking with Mr. Snagsby, which he always offers with a sort
of argumentative frankness, “hard up! My little woman is not in
general partial to strangers, particular—not to put too fine a
point upon it—when they want anything. But she was rather took
by something about this person, whether by his being unshaved, or
by his hair being in want of attention, or by what other ladies’ rea-
sons, I leave you to judge; and she accepted of the specimen, and
likewise of the address. My little woman hasn’t a good ear for names,”
proceeds Mr. Snagsby after consulting his cough of consideration
behind his hand, “and she considered Nemo equally the same as
Nimrod. In consequence of which, she got into a habit of saying to
me at meals, ‘Mr. Snagsby, you haven’t found Nimrod any work
yet!’ or ‘Mr. Snagsby, why didn’t you give that eight and thirty Chan-
cery folio in Jarndyce to Nimrod?’ or such like. And that is the way
he gradually fell into job-work at our place; and that is the most I
know of him except that he was a quick hand, and a hand not spar-
ing of night-work, and that if you gave him out, say, five and forty
folio on the Wednesday night, you would have it brought in on the
Thursday morning. All of which—” Mr. Snagsby concludes by po-
litely motioning with his hat towards the bed, as much as to add, “I
have no doubt my honourable friend would confirm if he were in a
condition to do it.”
“Hadn’t you better see,” says Mr. Tulkinghorn to Krook, “whether
he had any papers that may enlighten you? There will be an inquest,
and you will be asked the question. You can read?”
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By this time the news has got into the court. Groups of its
inhabitants assemble to discuss the thing, and the outposts of the
army of observation (principally boys) are pushed forward to Mr.
Krook’s window, which they closely invest. A policeman has already
walked up to the room, and walked down again to the door, where
he stands like a tower, only condescending to see the boys at his base
occasionally; but whenever he does see them, they quail and fall back.
Mrs. Perkins, who has not been for some weeks on speaking terms
with Mrs. Piper in consequence for an unpleasantness originating in
young Perkins’ having “fetched” young Piper “a crack,” renews her
friendly intercourse on this auspicious occasion. The potboy at the
corner, who is a privileged amateur, as possessing official knowledge
of life and having to deal with drunken men occasionally, exchanges
confidential communications with the policeman and has the ap-
pearance of an impregnable youth, unassailable by truncheons and
unconfinable in station-houses. People talk across the court out of
window, and bare-headed scouts come hurrying in from Chancery
Lane to know what’s the matter. The
general feeling seems to be that it’s a blessing Mr. Krook warn’t made
away with first, mingled with a little natural disappointment that he
was not. In the midst of this sensation, the beadle arrives.
The beadle, though generally understood in the neighbourhood
to be a ridiculous institution, is not without a certain popularity for
the moment, if it were only as a man who is going to see the body.
The policeman considers him an imbecile civilian, a remnant of the
barbarous watchmen times, but gives him admission as something
that must be borne with until government shall abolish him. The
sensation is heightened as the tidings spread from mouth to mouth
that the beadle is on the ground and has gone in.
By and by the beadle comes out, once more intensifying the sensa-
tion, which has rather languished in the interval. He is understood to
be in want of witnesses for the inquest to-morrow who can tell the
coroner and jury anything whatever respecting the deceased. Is imme-
diately referred to innumerable people who can tell nothing whatever.
Is made more imbecile by being constantly informed that Mrs. Green’s
son “was a law-writer his-self and knowed him better than anybody,”
which son of Mrs. Green’s appears, on inquiry, to be at the present
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time aboard a vessel bound for China, three months out, but consid-
ered accessible by telegraph on application to the Lords of the Admi-
ralty. Beadle goes into various shops and parlours, examining the in-
habitants, always shutting the door first, and by exclusion, delay, and
general idiotcy exasperating the public. Policeman seen to smile to
potboy. Public loses interest and undergoes reaction. Taunts the beadle
in shrill youthful voices with having boiled a boy, choruses fragments
of a popular song to that effect and importing that the boy was made
into soup for the workhouse. Policeman at last finds it necessary to
support the law and seize a vocalist, who is released upon the flight of
the rest on condition of his getting out of this then, come, and cutting
it—a condition he immediately observes. So the sensation dies off for
the time; and the unmoved policeman (to whom a little opium, more
or less, is nothing), with his shining hat, stiff stock, inflexible great-
coat, stout belt and bracelet, and all things fitting, pursues his lounging
way with a heavy tread, beating the palms of his white gloves one
against the other and stopping now and then at a street-corner to look
casually about for anything between a lost child and a murder.
Under cover of the night, the feeble-minded beadle comes flitting
about Chancery Lane with his summonses, in which every juror’s name
is wrongly spelt, and nothing rightly spelt but the beadle’s own name,
which nobody can read or wants to know. The summonses served and
his witnesses forewarned, the beadle goes to Mr. Krook’s to keep a
small appointment he has made with certain paupers, who, presently
arriving, are conducted upstairs, where they leave the great eyes in the
shutter something new to stare at, in that last shape which earthly
lodgings take for No one—and for Every one.
And all that night the coffin stands ready by the old portmanteau; and
the lonely figure on the bed, whose path in life has lain through five and
forty years, lies there with no more track behind him that any one can
trace than a deserted infant.
Next day the court is all alive—is like a fair, as Mrs. Perkins,
more than reconciled to Mrs. Piper, says in amicable conversation
with that excellent woman. The coroner is to sit in the first-floor
room at the Sol’s Arms, where the Harmonic Meetings take place
twice a week and where the chair is filled by a gentleman of profes-
sional celebrity, faced by Little Swills, the comic vocalist, who hopes
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(according to the bill in the window) that his friends will rally round
him and support first-rate talent. The Sol’s Arms does a brisk stroke
of business all the morning. Even children so require sustaining un-
der the general excitement that a pieman who has established himself
for the occasion at the corner of the court says his brandy-balls go off
like smoke. What time the beadle, hovering between the door of
Mr. Krook’s establishment and the door of the Sol’s Arms, shows
the curiosity in his keeping to a few discreet spirits and accepts the
compliment of a glass of ale or so in return.
At the appointed hour arrives the coroner, for whom the jurymen
are waiting and who is received with a salute of skittles from the
good dry skittle-ground attached to the Sol’s Arms. The coroner
frequents more public-houses than any man alive. The smell of saw-
dust, beer, tobacco-smoke, and spirits is inseparable in his vocation
from death in its most awful shapes. He is conducted by the beadle
and the landlord to the Harmonic Meeting Room, where he puts his
hat on the piano and takes a Windsor-chair at the head of a long table
formed of several short tables put together and ornamented with
glutinous rings in endless involutions, made by pots and glasses. As
many of the jury as can crowd together at the table sit there. The rest
get among the spittoons and pipes or lean against the piano. Over
the coroner’s head is a small iron garland, the pendant handle of a
bell, which rather gives the majesty of the court the appearance of
going to be hanged presently.
Call over and swear the jury! While the ceremony is in progress,
sensation is created by the entrance of a chubby little man in a large
shirt-collar, with a moist eye and an inflamed nose, who modestly
takes a position near the door as one of the general public, but seems
familiar with the room too. A whisper circulates that this is Little
Swills. It is considered not unlikely that he will get up an imitation
of the coroner and make it the principal feature of the Harmonic
Meeting in the evenlng.
“Well, gentlemen—” the coroner begins.
“Silence there, will you!” says the beadle. Not to the coroner, though
it might appear so.
“Well, gentlemen,” resumes the coroner. “You are impanelled here
to inquire into the death of a certain man. Evidence will be given
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before you as to the circumstances attending that death, and you will
give your verdict according to the—skittles; they must be stopped,
you know, beadle!—evidence, and not according to anything else.
The first thing to be done is to view the body.”
“Make way there!” cries the beadle.
So they go out in a loose procession, something after the manner
of a straggling funeral, and make their inspection in Mr. Krook’s
back second floor, from which a few of the jurymen retire pale and
precipitately. The beadle is very careful that two gentlemen not very
neat about the cuffs and buttons (for whose accommodation he has
provided a special little table near the coroner in the Harmonic Meeting
Room) should see all that is to be seen. For they are the public chroni-
clers of such inquiries by the line; and he is not
superior to the universal human infirmity, but hopes to read in print
what “Mooney, the active and intelligent beadle of the district,” said
and did and even aspires to see the name of Mooney as familiarly and
patronizingly mentioned as the name of the hangman is, according
to the latest examples.
Little Swills is waiting for the coroner and jury on their return. Mr.
Tulkinghorn, also. Mr. Tulkinghorn is received with distinction and
seated near the coroner between that high judicial officer, a bagatelle-
board, and the coal-box. The inquiry proceeds. The jury learn how the
subject of their inquiry died, and learn no more about him. “A very
eminent solicitor is in attendance, gentlemen,” says the coroner, “who,
I am informed, was accidentally present when discovery of the death
was made, but he could only repeat the evidence you have already
heard from the surgeon, the landlord, the lodger, and the law-statio-
ner, and it is not necessary to trouble him. Is anybody in attendance
who knows anything more?”
Mrs. Piper pushed forward by Mrs. Perkins. Mrs. Piper sworn.
Anastasia Piper, gentlemen. Married woman. Now, Mrs. Piper,
what have you got to say about this?
Why, Mrs. Piper has a good deal to say, chiefly in parentheses and
without punctuation, but not much to tell. Mrs. Piper lives in the
court (which her husband is a cabinet-maker), and it has long been
well beknown among the neighbours (counting from the day next but
one before the half-baptizing of Alexander James Piper aged eighteen
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months and four days old on accounts of not being expected to live
such was the sufferings gentlemen of that child in his gums) as the
plaintive—so Mrs. Piper insists on calling the deceased—was reported
to have sold himself. Thinks it was the plaintive’s air in which that
report originatinin. See the plaintive often and considered as his air was
feariocious and not to be allowed to go about some children being
timid (and if doubted hoping Mrs. Perkins may be brought forard for
she is here and will do credit to her husband and herself and family).
Has seen the plaintive wexed and worrited by the children (for chil-
dren they will ever be and you cannot expect them specially if of play-
ful dispositions to be Methoozellers which you was not yourself). On
accounts of this and his dark looks has often dreamed as she see him
take a pick-axe from his pocket and split Johnny’s head (which the
child knows not fear and has repeatually called after him close at his
eels). Never however see the plaintive take a pick-axe or any other
wepping far from it. Has seen him hurry away when run and called
after as if not partial to children and never see him speak to neither
child nor grown person at any time (excepting the boy that sweeps the
crossing down the lane over the way round the corner which if he was
here would tell you that he has been seen a-speaking to him frequent).
Says the coroner, is that boy here? Says the beadle, no, sir, he is not
here. Says the coroner, go and fetch him then. In the absence of the
active and intelligent, the coroner converses with Mr. Tulkinghorn.
Oh! Here’s the boy, gentlemen!
Here he is, very muddy, very hoarse, very ragged. Now, boy! But
stop a minute. Caution. This boy must be put through a few pre-
liminary paces.
Name, Jo. Nothing else that he knows on. Don’t know that ev-
erybody has two names. Never heerd of sich a think. Don’t know
that Jo is short for a longer name. Thinks it long enough for him. He
don’t find no fault with it. Spell it? No. He can’t spell it. No father, no
mother, no friends. Never been to school. What’s home? Knows a broom’s
a broom, and knows it’s wicked to tell a lie. Don’t recollect who told
him about the broom or about the lie, but knows both. Can’t exactly say
what’ll be done to him arter he’s dead if he tells a lie to the gentlemen
here, but believes it’ll be something wery bad to punish him, and serve
him right—and so he’ll tell the truth.
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action close on life—here they lower our dear brother down a foot or
two, here sow him in corruption, to be raised in corruption: an aveng-
ing ghost at many a sick-bedside, a shameful testimony to future ages
how civilization and barbarism walked this boastful island together.
Come night, come darkness, for you cannot come too soon or
stay too long by such a place as this! Come, straggling lights into the
windows of the ugly houses; and you who do iniquity therein, do it
at least with this dread scene shut out! Come, flame of gas, burning
so sullenly above the iron gate, on which the poisoned air deposits its
witch-ointment slimy to the touch! It is well that you should call to
every passerby, “Look here!”
With the night comes a slouching figure through the tunnel-court
to the outside of the iron gate. It holds the gate with its hands and
looks in between the bars, stands looking in for a little while.
It then, with an old broom it carries, softly sweeps the step and
makes the archway clean. It does so very busily and trimly, looks in
again a little while, and so departs.
Jo, is it thou? Well, well! Though a rejected witness, who “can’t
exactly say” what will be done to him in greater hands than men’s,
thou art not quite in outer darkness. There is something like a dis-
tant ray of light in thy muttered reason for this: “He wos wery good
to me, he wos!”
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CHAPTER XII
On the Watch
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to each other at the hotels where they tarry is the theme of general
admiration. Though my Lord is a little aged for my Lady, says Ma-
dame, the hostess of the Golden Ape, and though he might be her
amiable father, one can see at a glance that they love each other. One
observes my Lord with his white hair, standing, hat in hand, to help
my Lady to and from the carriage. One observes my Lady, how
recognisant of my Lord’s politeness, with an inclination of her gra-
cious head and the concession of her so-genteel fingers! It is ravishing!
The sea has no appreciation of great men, but knocks them about
like the small fry. It is habitually hard upon Sir Leicester, whose coun-
tenance it greenly mottles in the manner of sage-cheese and in whose
aristocratic system it effects a dismal revolution. It is the Radical of
Nature to him. Nevertheless, his dignity gets over it after stopping
to refit, and he goes on with my Lady for Chesney Wold, lying only
one night in London on the way to Lincolnshire.
Through the same cold sunlight, colder as the day declines, and through
the same sharp wind, sharper as the separate shadows of bare trees gloom
together in the woods, and as the Ghost’s Walk, touched at the western
corner by a pile of fire in the sky, resigns itself to coming night, they drive
into the park. The rooks, swinging in their lofty houses in the elm-tree
avenue, seem to discuss the question of the occupancy of the carriage as it
passes underneath, some agreeing that Sir Leicester and my Lady are
come down, some arguing with malcontents who won’t admit it, now
all consenting to consider the question disposed of, now all breaking out
again in violent debate, incited by one obstinate and drowsy bird who
will persist in putting in a last contradictory croak. Leaving them to
swing and caw, the travelling chariot rolls on to the house, where fires
gleam warmly through some of the windows, though not through so
many as to give an inhabited expression to the darkening mass of front.
But the brilliant and distinguished circle will soon do that.
Mrs. Rouncewell is in attendance and receives Sir Leicester’s
customary shake of the hand with a profound curtsy.
“How do you do, Mrs. Rouncewell? I am glad to see you.”
“I hope I have the honour of welcoming you in good health, Sir
Leicester?”
“In excellent health, Mrs. Rouncewell.”
“My Lady is looking charmingly well,” says Mrs. Rouncewell with
another curtsy.
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young lady, to interest her, I think she would have had the only kind
of excellence she wants.”
“Might not that have made her still more proud, grandmother?”
says Watt, who has been home and come back again, he is such a
good grandson.
“More and most, my dear,” returns the housekeeper with dignity,
“are words it’s not my place to use—nor so much as to hear—ap-
plied to any drawback on my Lady.”
“I beg your pardon, grandmother. But she is proud, is she not?”
“If she is, she has reason to be. The Dedlock family have always
reason to be.”
“Well,” says Watt, “it’s to be hoped they line out of their prayer-
books a certain passage for the common people about pride and vain-
glory. Forgive me, grandmother! Only a joke!”
“Sir Leicester and Lady Dedlock, my dear, are not fit subjects for
joking.”
“Sir Leicester is no joke by any means,” says Watt, “and I humbly
ask his pardon. I suppose, grandmother, that even with the family and
their guests down here, there is no ojection to my prolonging my stay
at the Dedlock Arms for a day or two, as any other traveller might?”
“Surely, none in the world, child.”
“I am glad of that,” says Watt, “because I have an inexpressible
desire to extend my knowledge of this beautiful neighbourhood.”
He happens to glance at Rosa, who looks down and is very shy
indeed. But according to the old superstition, it should be Rosa’s ears
that burn, and not her fresh bright cheeks, for my Lady’s maid is
holding forth about her at this moment with surpassing energy.
My Lady’s maid is a Frenchwoman of two and thirty, from some-
where in the southern country about Avignon and Marseilles, a large-
eyed brown woman with black hair who would be handsome but
for a certain feline mouth and general uncomfortable tightness of
face, rendering the jaws too eager and the skull too prominent. There
is something indefinably keen and wan about her anatomy, and she
has a watchful way of looking out of the corners of her eyes without
turning her head which could be pleasantly dispensed with, espe-
cially when she is in an ill humour and near knives. Through all the
good taste of her dress and little adornments, these objections so
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express themselves that she seems to go about like a very neat she-
wolf imperfectly tamed. Besides being accomplished in all the knowl-
edge appertaining to her post, she is almost an Englishwoman in her
acquaintance with the language; consequently, she is in no want of
words to shower upon Rosa for having attracted my Lady’s atten-
tion, and she pours them out with such grim ridicule as she sits at
dinner that her companion, the affectionate man, is rather relieved
when she arrives at the spoon stage of that performance.
Ha, ha, ha! She, Hortense, been in my Lady’s service since five
years and always kept at the distance, and this doll, this puppet, ca-
ressed—absolutely caressed—by my Lady on the moment of her
arriving at the house! Ha, ha, ha! “And do you know how pretty you
are, child?” “No, my Lady.” You are right there! “And how old are
you, child! And take care they do not spoil you by flattery, child!”
Oh, how droll! It is the best thing altogether.
In short, it is such an admirable thing that Mademoiselle Hortense
can’t forget it; but at meals for days afterwards, even among her
countrywomen and others attached in like capacity to the troop of
visitors, relapses into silent enjoyment of the joke—an enjoyment
expressed, in her own convivial manner, by an additional tightness of
face, thin elongation of compressed lips, and sidewise look, which
intense appreciation of humour is frequently reflected in my Lady’s
mirrors when my Lady is not among them.
All the mirrors in the house are brought into action now, many of
them after a long blank. They reflect handsome faces, simpering faces,
youthful faces, faces of threescore and ten that will not submit to be old;
the entire collection of faces that have come to pass a January week or
two at Chesney Wold, and which the fashionable intelligence, a mighty
hunter before the Lord, hunts with a keen scent, from their breaking
cover at the Court of St. James’s to their being run down to death. The
place in Lincolnshire is all alive. By day guns and voices are heard ringing
in the woods, horsemen and carriages enliven the park roads, servants
and hangers-on pervade the village and the Dedlock Arms. Seen by night
from distant openings in the trees, the row of windows in the long
drawing-room, where my Lady’s picture hangs over the great chimney-
piece, is like a row of jewels set in a black frame. On Sunday the chill
little church is almost warmed by so much gallant company, and the
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circle, all round, that nobody is in question but Boodle and his retinue,
and Buffy and his retinue. These are the great actors for whom the
stage is reserved. A People there are, no doubt—a certain large number
of supernumeraries, who are to be occasionally addressed, and relied
upon for shouts and choruses, as on the theatrical stage; but Boodle
and Buffy, their followers and families, their heirs, executors, adminis-
trators, and assigns, are the born first-actors, managers, and leaders, and
no others can appear upon the scene for ever and ever.
In this, too, there is perhaps more dandyism at Chesney Wold
than the brilliant and distinguished circle will find good for itself in
the long run. For it is, even with the stillest and politest circles, as
with the circle the necromancer draws around him—very strange
appearances may be seen in active motion outside. With this differ-
ence, that being realities and not phantoms, there is the greater dan-
ger of their breaking in.
Chesney Wold is quite full anyhow, so full that a burning sense of
injury arises in the breasts of ill-lodged ladies’-maids, and is not to he
extinguished. Only one room is empty. It is a turret chamber of the
third order of merit, plainly but comfortably furnished and having
an old-fashioned business air. It is Mr. Tulkinghorn’s room, and is
never bestowed on anybody else, for he may come at any time. He is
not come yet. It is his quiet habit to walk across the park from the
village in fine weather, to drop into this room as if he had never been
out of it since he was last seen there, to request a servant to inform
Sir Leicester that he is arrived in case he should be wanted, and to
appear ten minutes before dinner in the shadow of the library-door.
He sleeps in his turret with a complaining flag-staff over his head,
and has some leads outside on which, any fine morning when he is
down here, his black figure may be seen walking before breakfast like
a larger species of rook.
Every day before dinner, my Lady looks for him in the dusk of the
library, but he is not there. Every day at dinner, my Lady glances
down the table for the vacant place that would be waiting to receive
him if he had just arrived, but there is no vacant place. Every night
my Lady casually asks her maid, “Is Mr. Tulkinghorn come?”
Every night the answer is, “No, my Lady, not yet.”
One night, while having her hair undressed, my Lady loses herself
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in deep thought after this reply until she sees her own brooding face
in the opposite glass, and a pair of black eyes curiously observing her.
“Be so good as to attend,” says my Lady then, addressing the re-
flection of Hortense, “to your business. You can contemplate your
beauty at another time.”
“Pardon! It was your Ladyship’s beauty.”
“That,” says my Lady, “you needn’t contemplate at all.”
At length, one afternoon a little before sunset, when the bright
groups of figures which have for the last hour or two enlivened the
Ghost’s Walk are all dispersed and only Sir Leicester and my Lady re-
main upon the terrace, Mr. Tulkinghorn appears. He comes towards
them at his usual methodical pace, which is never quickened, never slack-
ened. He wears his usual expressionless mask—if it be a mask—and
carries family secrets in every limb of his body and every crease of his
dress. Whether his whole soul is devoted to the great or whether he
yields them nothing beyond the services he sells is his personal secret. He
keeps it, as he keeps the secrets of his clients; he is his own client in that
matter, and will never betray himself.
“How do you do, Mr. Tulkinghorn?” says Sir Leicester, giving him
his hand.
Mr. Tulkinghorn is quite well. Sir Leicester is quite well. My Lady
is quite well. All highly satisfactory. The lawyer, with his hands be-
hind him, walks at Sir Leicester’s side along the terrace. My Lady
walks upon the other side.
“We expected you before,” says Sir Leicester. A gracious observa-
tion. As much as to say, “Mr. Tulkinghorn, we remember your exist-
ence when you are not here to remind us of it by your presence. We
bestow a fragment of our minds upon you, sir, you see!”
Mr. Tulkinghorn, comprehending it, inclines his head and says he
is much obliged.
“I should have come down sooner,” he explains, “but that I have
been much engaged with those matters in the several suits between
yourself and Boythorn.”
“A man of a very ill-regulated mind,” observes Sir Leicester with
severity. “An extremely dangerous person in any community. A man
of a very low character of mind.”
“He is obstinate,” says Mr. Tulkinghorn.
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“It is natural to such a man to be so,” says Sir Leicester, looking most
profoundly obstinate himself. “I am not at all surprised to hear it.”
“The only question is,” pursues the lawyer, “whether you will give
up anything.”
“No, sir,” replies Sir Leicester. “Nothing. I give up?”
“I don’t mean anything of importance. That, of course, I know
you would not abandon. I mean any minor point.”
“Mr. Tulkinghorn,” returns Sir Leicester, “there can be no minor
point between myself and Mr. Boythorn. If I go farther, and observe
that I cannot readily conceive how any right of mine can be a minor
point, I speak not so much in reference to myself as an individual as
in reference to the family position I have it in charge to maintain.”
Mr. Tulkinghorn inclines his head again. “I have now my
instructions,” he says. “Mr. Boythorn will give us a good deal of
trouble—”
“It is the character of such a mind, Mr. Tulkinghorn,” Sir Leicester
interrupts him, “TO give trouble. An exceedingly ill-conditioned,
levelling person. A person who, fifty years ago, would probably have
been tried at the Old Bailey for some demagogue proceeding, and
severely punished—if not,” adds Sir Leicester after a moment’s pause,
“if not hanged, drawn, and quartered.”
Sir Leicester appears to discharge his stately breast of a burden in
passing this capital sentence, as if it were the next satisfactory thing to
having the sentence executed.
“But night is coming on,” says he, “and my Lady will take cold.
My dear, let us go in.”
As they turn towards the hall-door, Lady Dedlock addresses Mr.
Tulkinghorn for the first time.
“You sent me a message respecting the person whose writing I hap-
pened to inquire about. It was like you to remember the circum-
stance; I had quite forgotten it. Your message reminded me of it
again. I can’t imagine what association I had with a hand like that,
but I surely had some.”
“You had some?” Mr. Tulkinghorn repeats.
“Oh, yes!” returns my Lady carelessly. “I think I must have had
some. And did you really take the trouble to find out the writer of
that actual thing—what is it!—affidavit?”
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“Yes.”
“How very odd!”
They pass into a sombre breakfast-room on the ground floor, lighted
in the day by two deep windows. It is now twilight. The fire glows
brightly on the panelled wall and palely on the window-glass, where,
through the cold reflection of the blaze, the colder landscape shudders
in the wind and a grey mist creeps along, the only traveller besides the
waste of clouds.
My Lady lounges in a great chair in the chimney-corner, and Sir
Leicester takes another great chair opposite. The lawyer stands before
the fire with his hand out at arm’s length, shading his face. He looks
across his arm at my Lady.
“Yes,” he says, “I inquired about the man, and found him. And,
what is very strange, I found him—”
“Not to be any out-of-the-way person, I am afraid!” Lady Dedlock
languidly anticipates.
“I found him dead.”
“Oh, dear me!” remonstrated Sir Leicester. Not so much shocked
by the fact as by the fact of the fact being mentioned.
“I was directed to his lodging—a miserable, poverty-stricken
place—and I found him dead.”
“You will excuse me, Mr. Tulkinghorn,” observes Sir Leicester. “I
think the less said—”
“Pray, Sir Leicester, let me hear the story out” (it is my Lady speaking). “It
is quite a story for twilight. How very shocking! Dead?”
Mr, Tulkinghorn re-asserts it by another inclination of his head.
“Whether by his own hand—”
“Upon my honour!” cries Sir Leicester. “Really!”
“Do let me hear the story!” says my Lady.
“Whatever you desire, my dear. But, I must say—”
“No, you mustn’t say! Go on, Mr. Tulkinghorn.”
Sir Leicester’s gallantry concedes the point, though he still feels
that to bring this sort of squalor among the upper classes is really—
really—
“I was about to say,” resumes the lawyer with undisturbed calmness,
“that whether he had died by his own hand or not, it was beyond my
power to tell you. I should amend that phrase, however, by saying that
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CHAPTER XIII
Esther’s Narrative
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he was taken by the newest idea and was glad to get rid of the trouble
of consideration, I wondered whether the Latin verses often ended in
this or whether Richard’s was a solitary case.
Mr. Jarndyce took great pains to talk with him seriously and to
put it to his good sense not to deceive himself in so important a
matter. Richard was a little grave after these interviews, but invari-
ably told Ada and me that it was all right, and then began to talk
about something else.
“By heaven!” cried Mr. Boythorn, who interested himself strongly
in the subject—though I need not say that, for he could do nothing
weakly; “I rejoice to find a young gentleman of spirit and gallantry
devoting himself to that noble profession! The more spirit there is in
it, the better for mankind and the worse for those mercenary task-
masters and low tricksters who delight in putting that illustrious art
at a disadvantage in the world. By all that is base and despicable,”
cried Mr. Boythorn, “the treatment of surgeons aboard ship is such
that I would submit the legs—both legs—of every member of the
Admiralty Board to a compound fracture and render it a transport-
able offence in any qualified practitioner to set them if the system
were not wholly changed in eight and forty hours!”
“Wouldn’t you give them a week?” asked Mr. Jarndyce.
“No!” cried Mr. Boythorn firmly. “Not on any consideration! Eight
and forty hours! As to corporations, parishes, vestry-boards, and simi-
lar gatherings of jolter-headed clods who assemble to exchange such
speeches that, by heaven, they ought to be worked in quicksilver
mines for the short remainder of their miserable existence, if it were
only to prevent their detestable English from contaminating a lan-
guage spoken in the presence of the sun—as to those fellows, who
meanly take advantage of the ardour of gentlemen in the pursuit of
knowledge to recompense the inestimable services
of the best years of their lives, their long study, and their expensive
education with pittances too small for the acceptance of clerks, I
would have the necks of every one of them wrung and their skulls
arranged in Surgeons’ Hall for the contemplation of the whole pro-
fession in order that its younger members might understand from
actual measurement, in early life, how thick skulls may become!”
He wound up this vehement declaration by looking round upon us
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with a most agreeable smile and suddenly thundering, “Ha, ha, ha!” over
and over again, until anybody else might have been expected to be quite
subdued by the exertion.
As Richard still continued to say that he was fixed in his choice after
repeated periods for consideration had been recommended by Mr.
Jarndyce and had expired, and he still continued to assure Ada and me
in the same final manner that it was “all right,” it became advisable to
take Mr. Kenge into council. Mr. Kenge, therefore, came down to
dinner one day, and leaned back in his chair, and turned his eye-glasses
over and over, and spoke in a sonorous voice, and did exactly what I
remembered to have seen him do when I was a little girl.
“Ah!” said Mr. Kenge. “Yes. Well! A very good profession, Mr.
Jarndyce, a very good profession.”
“The course of study and preparation requires to be diligently pur-
sued,” observed my guardian with a glance at Richard.
“Oh, no doubt,” said Mr. Kenge. “Diligently.”
“But that being the case, more or less, with all pursuits that are
worth much,” said Mr. Jarndyce, “it is not a special consideration
which another choice would be likely to escape.”
“Truly,” said Mr. Kenge. “And Mr. Richard Carstone, who has so
meritoriously acquitted himself in the—shall I say the classic shades?—
in which his youth had been passed, will, no doubt, apply the habits,
if not the principles and practice, of versification in that tongue in
which a poet was said (unless I mistake) to be born, not made, to the
more eminently practical field of action on which he enters.”
“You may rely upon it,” said Richard in his off-hand manner, “that
I shall go at it and do my best.”
“Very well, Mr. Jarndyce!” said Mr. Kenge, gently nodding his
head. “Really, when we are assured by Mr. Richard that he means to
go at it and to do his best,” nodding feelingly and smoothly over
those expressions, “I would submit to you that we have only to in-
quire into the best mode of carrying out the object of his ambition.
Now, with reference to placing Mr. Richard with some sufficiently
eminent practitioner. Is there any one in view at present?”
“No one, Rick, I think?” said my guardian.
“No one, sir,” said Richard.
“Quite so!” observed Mr. Kenge. “As to situation, now. Is there
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I felt all through the performance that he never looked at the actors
but constantly looked at me, and always with a carefully prepared
expression of the deepest misery and the profoundest dejection.
It quite spoiled my pleasure for that night because it was so very
embarrassing and so very ridiculous. But from that time forth, we
never went to the play without my seeing Mr. Guppy in the pit,
always with his hair straight and flat, his shirt-collar turned down,
and a general feebleness about him. If he were not there when we
went in, and I began to hope he would not come and yielded myself
for a little while to the interest of the scene, I was certain to encoun-
ter his languishing eyes when I least expected it and, from that time,
to be quite sure that they were fixed upon me all the evening.
I really cannot express how uneasy this made me. If he would only
have brushed up his hair or turned up his collar, it would have been
bad enough; but to know that that absurd figure was always gazing
at me, and always in that demonstrative state of despondency, put
such a constraint upon me that I did not like to laugh at the play, or
to cry at it, or to move, or to speak. I seemed able to do nothing
naturally. As to escaping Mr. Guppy by going to the back of the box,
I could not bear to do that because I knew Richard and Ada relied on
having me next them and that they could never have talked together
so happily if anybody else had been in my place. So there I sat, not
knowing where to look—for wherever I looked, I knew Mr. Guppy’s
eyes were following me—and thinking of the dreadful expense to
which this young man was putting himself on my account.
Sometimes I thought of telling Mr. Jarndyce. Then I feared that the
young man would lose his situation and that I might ruin him. Some-
times I thought of confiding in Richard, but was deterred by the pos-
sibility of his fighting Mr. Guppy and giving him black eyes. Some-
times I thought, should I frown at him or shake my head. Then I felt
I could not do it. Sometimes I considered whether I should write to
his mother, but that ended in my being convinced that to open a cor-
respondence would he to make the matter worse. I always came to the
conclusion, finally, that I could do nothing. Mr. Guppy’s persever-
ance, all this time, not only produced him regularly at any theatre to
which we went, but caused him to appear in the crowd as we were
coming out, and even to get up behind our fly—where I am sure I saw
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him, two or three times, struggling among the most dreadful spikes.
After we got home, he haunted a post opposite our house. The
upholsterer’s where we lodged being at the corner of two streets, and
my bedroom window being opposite the post, I was afraid to go near
the window when I went upstairs, lest I should see him (as I did one
moonlight night) leaning against the post and evidenfly catching cold.
If Mr. Guppy had not been, fortunately for me, engaged in the day-
time, I really should have had no rest from him.
While we were making this round of gaieties, in which Mr. Guppy
so extraordinarily participated, the business which had helped to bring
us to town was not neglected. Mr. Kenge’s cousin was a Mr. Bayham
Badger, who had a good practice at Chelsea and attended a large
public institution besides. He was quite willing to receive Richard
into his house and to superintend his studies, and as it seemed that
those could be pursued advantageously under Mr. Badger’s roof, and
Mr. Badger liked Richard, and as Richard said he liked Mr. Badger
“well enough,” an agreement was made, the Lord Chancellor’s con-
sent was obtained, and it was all settled.
On the day when matters were concluded between Richard and Mr.
Badger, we were all under engagement to dine at Mr. Badger’s house.
We were to be “merely a family party,” Mrs. Badger’s note said; and we
found no lady there but Mrs. Badger herself. She was surrounded in
the drawing-room by various objects, indicative of her painting a little,
playing the piano a little, playing the guitar a little, playing the harp a
little, singing a little, working a little, reading a little, writing poetry a
little, and botanizing a little. She was a lady of about fifty, I should
think, youthfully dressed, and of a very fine complexion. If I add to
the little list of her accomplishments that she rouged a little, I do not
mean that there was any harm in it.
Mr. Bayham Badger himself was a pink, fresh-faced, crisp-looking
gentleman with a weak voice, white teeth, light hair, and surprised eyes,
some years younger, I should say, than Mrs. Bayham Badger. He ad-
mired her exceedingly, but principally, and to begin with, on the curious
ground (as it seemed to us) of her having had three husbands. We had
barely taken our seats when he said to Mr. Jarndyce quite triumphantly,
“You would hardly suppose that I am Mrs. Bayham Badger’s third!”
“Indeed?” said Mr. Jarndyce.
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“Her third!” said Mr. Badger. “Mrs. Bayham Badger has not the
appearance, Miss Summerson, of a lady who has had two former
husbands?”
I said “Not at all!”
“And most remarkable men!” said Mr. Badger in a tone of confi-
dence. “Captain Swosser of the Royal Navy, who was Mrs. Badger’s
first husband, was a very distinguished officer indeed. The name of
Professor Dingo, my immediate predecessor, is one of European
reputation.”
Mrs. Badger overheard him and smiled.
“Yes, my dear!” Mr. Badger replied to the smile, “I was observing
to Mr. Jarndyce and Miss Summerson that you had had two former
husbands—both very distinguished men. And they found it, as people
generally do, difficult to believe.”
“I was barely twenty,” said Mrs. Badger, “when I married Captain
Swosser of the Royal Navy. I was in the Mediterranean with him; I
am quite a sailor. On the twelfth anniversary of my wedding-day, I
became the wife of Professor Dingo.”
“Of European reputation,” added Mr. Badger in an undertone.
“And when Mr. Badger and myself were married,” pursued Mrs.
Badger, “we were married on the same day of the year. I had become
attached to the day.”
“So that Mrs. Badger has been married to three husbands—two of
them highly distinguished men,” said Mr. Badger, summing up the
facts, “and each time upon the twenty-first of March at eleven in the
forenoon!”
We all expressed our admiration.
“But for Mr. Badger’s modesty,” said Mr. Jarndyce, “I would take
leave to correct him and say three distinguished men.”
“Thank you, Mr. Jarndyce! What I always tell him!” observed Mrs.
Badger.
“And, my dear,” said Mr. Badger, “what do I always tell you? That
without any affectation of disparaging such professional distinction as
I may have attained (which our friend Mr. Carstone will have many
opportunities of estimating), I am not so weak—no, really,” said Mr.
Badger to us generally, “so unreasonable—as to put my reputation on
the same footing with such first-rate men as Captain Swosser and Pro-
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given to the officers of that ship when she lay in Plymouth Harbour.
“The dear old Crippler!” said Mrs. Badger, shaking her head. “She
was a noble vessel. Trim, ship-shape, all a taunto, as Captain Swosser
used to say. You must excuse me if I occasionally introduce a nautical
expression; I was quite a sailor once. Captain Swosser loved that craft
for my sake. When she was no longer in commission, he frequently
said that if he were rich enough to buy her old hulk, he would have an
inscription let into the timbers of the quarter-deck where we stood as
partners in the dance to mark the spot where he fell—raked fore and
aft (Captain Swosser used to say) by the fire from my tops. It was his
naval way of mentioning my eyes.”
Mrs. Badger shook her head, sighed, and looked in the glass.
“It was a great change from Captain Swosser to Professor Dingo,”
she resumed with a plaintive smile. “I felt it a good deal at first. Such
an entire revolution in my mode of life! But custom, combined with
science—particularly science—inured me to it. Being the professor’s
sole companion in his botanical excursions, I almost forgot that I
had ever been afloat, and became quite learned. It is singular that the
professor was the antipodes of Captain Swosser and that Mr. Badger
is not in the least like either!”
We then passed into a narrative of the deaths of Captain Swosser and
Professor Dingo, both of whom seem to have had very bad complaints.
In the course of it, Mrs. Badger signified to us that she had never madly
loved but once and that the object of that wild affection, never to be
recalled in its fresh enthusiasm, was Captain Swosser. The professor was
yet dying by inches in the most dismal manner, and Mrs. Badger was
giving us imitations of his way of saying, with great difficulty, “Where is
Laura? Let Laura give me my toast and water!” when the entrance of the
gentlemen consigned him to the tomb.
Now, I observed that evening, as I had observed for some days
past, that Ada and Richard were more than ever attached to each
other’s society, which was but natural, seeing that they were going to
be separated so soon. I was therefore not very much surprised when
we got home, and Ada and I retired upstairs, to find Ada more silent
than usual, though I was not quite prepared for her coming into my
arms and beginning to speak to me, with her face hidden.
“My darling Esther!” murmured Ada. “I have a great secret to
tell you!”
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do! You know, you know I do!” And then sobbed out, “With all my
heart I do! With all my whole heart, Esther!”
I told her, laughing, why I had known that, too, just as well as I
had known the other! And we sat before the fire, and I had all the
talking to myself for a little while (though there was not much of
it); and Ada was soon quiet and happy.
“Do you think my cousin John knows, dear Dame Durden?” she
asked.
“Unless my cousin John is blind, my pet,” said I, “I should think
my cousin John knows pretty well as much as we know.”
“We want to speak to him before Richard goes,” said Ada timidly,
“and we wanted you to advise us, and to tell him so. Perhaps you
wouldn’t mind Richard’s coming in, Dame Durden?”
“Oh! Richard is outside, is he, my dear?” said I.
“I am not quite certain,” returned Ada with a bashful simplicity
that would have won my heart if she had not won it long before,
“but I think he’s waiting at the door.”
There he was, of course. They brought a chair on either side of
me, and put me between them, and really seemed to have fallen in
love with me instead of one another, they were so confiding, and so
trustful, and so fond of me. They went on in their own wild way for
a little while—I never stopped them; I enjoyed it too much my-
self—and then we gradually fell to considering how young they were,
and how there must be a lapse of several years before this early love
could come to anything, and how it could come to happiness only if
it were real and lasting and inspired them with a steady resolution to
do their duty to each other, with constancy, fortitude, and persever-
ance, each always for the other’s sake. Well! Richard said that he would
work his fingers to the bone for Ada, and Ada said that she would
work her fingers to the bone for Richard, and they called me all sorts
of endearing and sensible names, and we sat there, advising and talk-
ing, half the night. Finally, before we parted, I gave them my prom-
ise to speak to their cousin John to-morrow.
So, when to-morrow came, I went to my guardian after breakfast,
in the room that was our town-substitute for the growlery, and told
him that I had it in trust to tell him something.
“Well, little woman,” said he, shutting up his book, “if you have
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come at all. I will assume that a few years hence you will be in your
hearts to one another what you are to-day. All I say before speaking
to you according to that assumption is, if you do change—if you
do come to find that you are more commonplace cousins to each
other as man and woman than you were as boy and girl (your man-
hood will excuse me, Rick!)—don’t be ashamed still to confide in
me, for there will be nothing monstrous or uncommon in it. I am
only your friend and distant kinsman. I have no power over you
whatever. But I wish and hope to retain your confidence if I do
nothing to forfeit it.”
“I am very sure, sir,” returned Richard, “that I speak for Ada too
when I say that you have the strongest power over us both—rooted
in respect, gratitude, and affection—strengthening every day.”
“Dear cousin John,” said Ada, on his shoulder, “my father’s place
can never be empty again. All the love and duty I could ever have
rendered to him is transferred to you.”
“Come!” said Mr. Jarndyce. “Now for our assumption. Now we lift
our eyes up and look hopefully at the distance! Rick, the world is before
you; and it is most probable that as you enter it, so it will receive you.
Trust in nothing but in Providence and your own efforts. Never separate
the two, like the heathen waggoner. Constancy in love is a good thing,
but it means nothing, and is nothing, without constancy in every kind of
effort. If you had the abilities of all the great men, past and present, you
could do nothing well without sincerely meaning it and setting about it.
If you entertain the supposition that any real success, in great things or in
small, ever was or could be, ever will or can be, wrested from Fortune by
fits and starts, leave that wrong idea here or leave your cousin Ada here.”
“I will leave it here, sir,” replied Richard smiling, “if I brought it
here just now (but I hope I did not), and will work my way on to my
cousin Ada in the hopeful distance.”
“Right!” said Mr. Jarndyce. “If you are not to make her happy,
why should you pursue her?”
“I wouldn’t make her unhappy—no, not even for her love,” re-
torted Richard proudly.
“Well said!” cried Mr. Jarndyce. “That’s well said! She remains
here, in her home with me. Love her, Rick, in your active life, no less
than in her home when you revisit it, and all will go well. Otherwise,
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all will go ill. That’s the end of my preaching. I think you and Ada
had better take a walk.”
Ada tenderly embraced him, and Richard heartily shook hands
with him, and then the cousins went out of the room, looking back
again directly, though, to say that they would wait for me.
The door stood open, and we both followed them with our eyes
as they passed down the adjoining room, on which the sun was shin-
ing, and out at its farther end. Richard with his head bent, and her
hand drawn through his arm, was talking to her very earnestly; and
she looked up in his face, listening, and seemed to see nothing else.
So young, so beautiful, so full of hope and promise, they went on
lightly through the sunlight as their own happy thoughts might then
be traversing the years to come and making them all years of bright-
ness. So they passed away into the shadow and were gone. It was
only a burst of light that had been so radiant. The room darkened as
they went out, and the sun was clouded over.
“Am I right, Esther?” said my guardian when they were gone.
He was so good and wise to ask me whether he was right!
“Rick may gain, out of this, the quality he wants. Wants, at the
core of so much that is good!” said Mr. Jarndyce, shaking his head. “I
have said nothing to Ada, Esther. She has her friend and counsellor
always near.” And he laid his hand lovingly upon my head.
I could not help showing that I was a little moved, though I did all
I could to conceal it.
“Tut tut!” said he. “But we must take care, too, that our little
woman’s life is not all consumed in care for others.”
“Care? My dear guardian, I believe I am the happiest creature in
the world!”
“I believe so, too,” said he. “But some one may find out what
Esther never will—that the little woman is to be held in remem-
brance above all other people!”
I have omitted to mention in its place that there was some one else
at the family dinner party. It was not a lady. It was a
gentleman. It was a gentleman of a dark complexion—a young sur-
geon. He was rather reserved, but I thought him very sensible and
agreeable. At least, Ada asked me if I did not, and I said yes.
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CHAPTER XIV
Deportment
RICHARD LEFT US on the very next evening to begin his new career, and
committed Ada to my charge with great love for her and great trust in
me. It touched me then to reflect, and it touches me now, more nearly,
to remember (having what I have to tell) how they both thought of me,
even at that engrossing time. I was a part of all their plans, for the present
and the future, I was to write Richard once a week, making my faithful
report of Ada, who was to write to him every alternate day. I was to be
informed, under his own hand, of all his labours and successes; I was to
observe how resolute and persevering he would be; I was to be Ada’s
bridesmaid when they were married; I was to live with them afterwards;
I was to keep all the keys of their house; I was to be made happy for ever
and a day.
“And if the suit should make us rich, Esther—which it may, you
know!” said Richard to crown all.
A shade crossed Ada’s face.
“My dearest Ada,” asked Richard, “why not?”
“It had better declare us poor at once,” said Ada.
“Oh! I don’t know about that,” returned Richard, “but at all events,
it won’t declare anything at once. It hasn’t declared anything in heaven
knows how many years.”
“Too true,” said Ada.
“Yes, but,” urged Richard, answering what her look suggested rather
than her words, “the longer it goes on, dcar cousin, the nearer it must
be to a settlement one way or other. Now, is not that reasonable?”
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cook supposed that he had “gone after the sheep.” When we repeated,
with some surprise, “The sheep?” he said, Oh, yes, on market days he
sometimes followed them quite out of town and came back in such
a state as never was!
I was sitting at the window with my guardian on the following
morning, and Ada was busy writing-of course to Richard—when
Miss Jellyby was announced, and entered, leading the identical Peepy,
whom she had made some endeavours to render presentable by wip-
ing the dirt into corners of his face and hands and making his hair
very wet and then violently frizzling it with her fingers. Everything
the dear child wore was either too large for him or too small. Among
his other contradictory decorations he had the hat of a bishop and the
little gloves of a baby. His boots were, on a small scale, the boots of a
ploughman, while his legs, so crossed and recrossed with scratches that
they looked like maps, were bare below a very short pair of plaid drawers
finished off with two frills of perfectly different patterns. The deficient
buttons on his plaid frock had evidently been supplied from one of Mr.
Jellyby’s coats, they were so extremely brazen and so much too large.
Most extraordinary specimens of needlework appeared on several parts
of his dress, where it had been hastily mended, and I recognized the same
hand on Miss Jellyby’s. She was, however, unaccountably improved in
her appearance and looked very pretty. She was conscious of poor little
Peepy being but a failure after all her trouble, and she showed it as she
came in by the way in which she glanced first at him and then at us.
“Oh, dear me!” said my guardian. “Due east!”
Ada and I gave her a cordial welcome and presented her to Mr.
Jarndyce, to whom she said as she sat down, “Ma’s compliments, and
she hopes you’ll excuse her, because she’s correcting proofs of the plan.
She’s going to put out five thousand new circulars, and she knows
you’ll be interested to hear that. I have brought one of them with me.
Ma’s compliments.” With which she presented it sulkily enough.
“Thank you,” said my guardian. “I am much obliged to Mrs.
Jellyby. Oh, dear me! This is a very trying wind!”
We were busy with Peepy, taking off his clerical hat, asking him if
he remembered us, and so on. Peepy retired behind his elbow at first,
but relented at the sight of sponge-cake and allowed me to take him
on my lap, where he sat munching quietly. Mr. Jarndyce then with-
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it, and I have no time to improve things if I knew how, and Ma don’t
care about anything, I should like to make out how Pa is to weather
the storm. I declare if I was Pa, I’d run away.”
“My dear!” said I, smiling. “Your papa, no doubt, considers his
family.”
“Oh, yes, his family is all very fine, Miss Summerson,” replied
Miss Jellyby; “but what comfort is his family to him? His family is
nothing but bills, dirt, waste, noise, tumbles downstairs, confusion,
and wretchedness. His scrambling home, from week’s end to week’s
end, is like one great washing-day—only nothing’s washed!”
Miss Jellyby tapped her foot upon the floor and wiped her eyes.
“I am sure I pity Pa to that degree,” she said, “and am so angry with
Ma that I can’t find words to express myself! However, I am not
going to bear it, I am determined. I won’t be a slave all my life, and I
won’t submit to be proposed to by Mr. Quale. A pretty thing, in-
deed, to marry a philanthropist. As if I hadn’t had enough of that!”
said poor Miss Jellyby.
I must confess that I could not help feeling rather angry with Mrs.
Jellyby myself, seeing and hearing this neglected girl and knowing
how much of bitterly satirical truth there was in what she said.
“If it wasn’t that we had been intimate when you stopped at our
house,” pursued Miss Jellyby, “I should have been ashamed to come
here to-day, for I know what a figure I must seem to you two. But as
it is, I made up my mind to call, especially as I am not likely to see
you again the next time you come to town.”
She said this with such great significance that Ada and I glanced at
one another, foreseeing something more.
“No!” said Miss Jellyby, shaking her head. “Not at all likely! I
know I may trust you two. I am sure you won’t betray me. I am
engaged.”
“Without their knowledge at home?” said I.
“Why, good gracious me, Miss Summerson,” she returned, justi-
fying herself in a fretful but not angry manner, “how can it be other-
wise? You know what Ma is—and I needn’t make poor Pa more
miserable by telling him.”
“But would it not he adding to his unhappiness to marry without
his knowledge or consent, my dear?” said I.
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“No,” said Miss Jellyby, softening. “”I hope not. I should try to
make him happy and comfortable when he came to see me, and
Peepy and the others should take it in turns to come and stay with
me, and they should have some care taken of them then.”
There was a good deal of affection in poor Caddy. She softened
more and more while saying this and cried so much over the unwonted
little home-picture she had raised in her mind that Peepy, in his cave
under the piano, was touched, and turned himself over on his back
with loud lamentations. It was not until I had brought him to kiss his
sister, and had restored him to his place on my lap, and had shown him
that Caddy was laughing (she laughed expressly for the purpose), that
we could recall his peace of mind; even then it was for some time
conditional on his taking us in turns by the chin and smoothing our
faces all over with his hand. At last, as his spirits were not equal to the
piano, we put him on a chair to look out of window; and Miss Jellyby,
holding him by one leg, resumed her confidence.
“It began in your coming to our house,” she said.
We naturally asked how.
“I felt I was so awkward,” she replied, “that I made up my mind to
be improved in that respect at all events and to learn to dance. I told
Ma I was ashamed of myself, and I must be taught to dance. Ma
looked at me in that provoking way of hers as if I wasn’t in sight, but
I was quite determined to be taught to dance, and so I went to Mr.
Turveydrop’s Academy in Newman Street.”
“And was it there, my dear—” I began.
“Yes, it was there,” said Caddy, “and I am engaged to Mr.
Turveydrop. There are two Mr. Turveydrops, father and son. My
Mr. Turveydrop is the son, of course. I only wish I had been better
brought up and was likely to make him a better wife, for I am very
fond of him.”
“I am sorry to hear this,” said I, “I must confess.”
“I don’t know why you should be sorry,” she retorted a little anx-
iously, “but I am engaged to Mr. Turveydrop, whether or no, and he is
very fond of me. It’s a secret as yet, even on his side, because old Mr.
Turveydrop has a share in the connexion and it might break his heart
or give him some other shock if he was told of it abruptly. Old Mr.
Turveydrop is a very gentlemanly man indeed—very gentlemanly.”
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where I first went with you, because I like the poor thing for her own
sake and I believe she likes me. If you could see young Mr. Turveydrop,
I am sure you would think well of him—at least, I am sure you
couldn’t possibly think any ill of him. I am going there now for my
lesson. I couldn’t ask you to go with me, Miss Summerson; but if
you would,” said Caddy,
who had said all this earnestly and tremblingly, “I should be very
glad—very glad.”
It happened that we had arranged with my guardian to go to Miss
Flite’s that day. We had told him of our former visit, and our ac-
count had interested him; but something had always happened to
prevent our going there again. As I trusted that I might have suffi-
cient influence with Miss Jellyby to prevent her taking any very rash
step if I fully accepted the confidence she was so willing to place in
me, poor girl, I proposed that she and I and Peepy should go to the
academy and afterwards meet my guardian and Ada at Miss Flite’s,
whose name I now learnt for the first time. This was on condition
that Miss Jellyby and Peepy should come back with us to dinner.
The last article of the agreement being joyfully acceded to by both,
we smartened Peepy up a little with the assistance of a few pins, some
soap and water, and a hair-brush, and went out, bending our steps
towards Newman Street, which was very near.
I found the academy established in a sufficiently dingy house at
the corner of an archway, with busts in all the staircase windows. In
the same house there were also established, as I gathered from the
plates on the door, a drawing-master, a coal-merchant (there was,
certainly, no room for his coals), and a lithographic artist. On the
plate which, in size and situation, took precedence of all the rest, I
read, Mr. Turveydrop. The door was open, and the hall was blocked
up by a grand piano, a harp, and several other musical instruments in
cases, all in progress of removal, and all looking rakish in the day-
light. Miss Jellyby informed me that the academy had been lent, last
night, for a concert.
We went upstairs—it had been quite a fine house once, when it
was anybody’s business to keep it clean and fresh, and nobody’s busi-
ness to smoke in it all day—and into Mr. Turveydrop’s great room,
which was built out into a mews at the back and was lighted by a
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I could not help being amused, though I heard the old lady out
with feelings of real concern. It was difficult to doubt her with the
father and son before me. What I might have thought of them with-
out the old lady’s account, or what I might have thought of the old
lady’s account without them, I cannot say. There was a fitness of
things in the whole that carried conviction with it.
My eyes were yet wandering, from young Mr. Turveydrop working
so hard, to old Mr. Turveydrop deporting himself so beautifully, when
the latter came ambling up to me and entered into conversation.
He asked me, first of all, whether I conferred a charm and a dis-
tinction on London by residing in it? I did not think it
necessary to reply that I was perfectly aware I should not do that, in
any case, but merely told him where I did reside.
“A lady so graceful and accomplished,” he said, kissing his right glove
and afterwards extending it towards the pupils, “will look leniently on
the deficiencies here. We do our best to polish—polish—polish!”
He sat down beside me, taking some pains to sit on the form. I
thought, in imitation of the print of his illustrious model on the
sofa. And really he did look very like it.
“To polish—polish—polish!” he repeated, taking a pinch of snuff
and gently fluttering his fingers. “But we are not, if I may say so to
one formed to be graceful both by Nature and Art—” with the high-
shouldered bow, which it seemed impossible for him to make with-
out lifting up his eyebrows and shutting his eyes “—we are not what
we used to be in point of deportment.”
“Are we not, sir?” said I.
“We have degenerated,” he returned, shaking his head, which he
could do to a very limited extent in his cravat. “A levelling age is not
favourable to deportment. It develops vulgarity. Perhaps I speak with
some little partiality. It may not be for me to say that I have been
called, for some years now, Gentleman Turveydrop, or that his Royal
Highness the Prince Regent did me the honour to inquire, on my
removing my hat as he drove out of the Pavilion at Brighton (that
fine building), ‘Who is he? Who the devil is he? Why don’t I know
him? Why hasn’t he thirty thousand a year?’ But these are little mat-
ters of anecdote—the general property, ma’am—still repeated occa-
sionally among the upper classes.”
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“Indeed?” said I.
He replied with the high-shouldered bow. “Where what is left among
us of deportment,” he added, “still lingers. England—alas, my coun-
try!—has degenerated very much, and is degenerating every day. She
has not many gentlemen left. We are few. I see nothing to succeed us
but a race of weavers.”
“One might hope that the race of gentlemen would be perpetu-
ated here,” said I.
“You are very good.” He smiled with a high-shouldered bow again.
“You flatter me. But, no—no! I have never been able to imbue my
poor boy with that part of his art. Heaven forbid that I should dis-
parage my dear child, but he has—no deportment.”
“He appears to be an excellent master,” I observed.
“Understand me, my dear madam, he IS an excellent master. All
that can be acquired, he has acquired. All that can be imparted, he can
impart. But there are things—” He took another pinch of snuff and
made the bow again, as if to add, “This kind of thing, for instance.”
I glanced towards the centre of the room, where Miss Jellyby’s
lover, now engaged with single pupils, was undergoing greater drudgery
than ever.
“My amiable child,” murmured Mr. Turveydrop, adjusting his cravat.
“Your son is indefatigable,” said I.
“It is my reward,” said Mr. Turveydrop, “to hear you say so. In
some respects, he treads in the footsteps of his sainted mother. She
was a devoted creature. But wooman, lovely wooman,” said Mr.
Turveydrop with very disagreeable gallantry, “what a sex you are!”
I rose and joined Miss Jellyby, who was by this time putting on
her bonnet. The time allotted to a lesson having fully elapsed, there
was a general putting on of bonnets. When Miss Jellyby and the
unfortunate Prince found an opportunity to become betrothed I don’t
know, but they certainly found none on this occasion to exchange a
dozen words.
“My dear,” said Mr. Turveydrop benignly to his son, “do you know
the hour?”
“No, father.” The son had no watch. The father had a handsome
gold one, which he pulled out with an air that was an example to
mankind.
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“My son,” said he, “it’s two o’clock. Recollect your school at
Kensington at three.”
“That’s time enough for me, father,” said Prince. “I can take a
morsel of dinner standing and be off.”
“My dear boy,” returned his father, “you must be very quick. You
will find the cold mutton on the table.”
“Thank you, father. Are you off now, father?”
“Yes, my dear. I suppose,” said Mr. Turveydrop, shutting his eyes
and lifting up his shoulders with modest consciousness, “that I must
show myself, as usual, about town.”
“You had better dine out comfortably somewhere,” said his son.
“My dear child, I intend to. I shall take my little meal, I think, at
the French house, in the Opera Colonnade.”
“That’s right. Good-bye, father!” said Prince, shaking hands.
“Good-bye, my son. Bless you!”
Mr. Turveydrop said this in quite a pious manner, and it seemed to
do his son good, who, in parting from him, was so pleased with
him, so dutiful to him, and so proud of him that I almost felt as if it
were an unkindness to the younger man not to be able to believe
implicitly in the elder. The few moments that were occupied by Prince
in taking leave of us (and particularly of one of us, as I saw, being in
the secret), enhanced my favourable impression of his almost child-
ish character. I felt a liking for him and a compassion for him as he
put his little kit in his pocket—and with it his desire to stay a little
while with Caddy—and went away good-humouredly to his cold
mutton and his school at Kensington, that made me scarcely less
irate with his father than the censorious old lady.
The father opened the room door for us and bowed us out in a
manner, I must acknowledge, worthy of his shining original. In the
same style he presently passed us on the other side of the street, on
his way to the aristocratic part of the town, where he was going to
show himself among the few other gentlemen left. For some mo-
ments, I was so lost in reconsidering what I had heard and seen in
Newman Street that I was quite unable to talk to Caddy or even to
fix my attention on what she said to me, especially when I began to
inquire in my mind whether there were, or ever had been, any other
gentlemen, not in the dancing profession, who lived and founded a
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“For the Chancellor,” said the old man with a chuckle, “not to be
acquainted with a Jarndyce is queer, ain’t it, Miss Flite? Mightn’t I take
the liberty? Your servant, sir. I know Jarndyce and Jarndyce a’most as
well as you do, sir. I knowed old Squire Tom, sir. I never to my knowl-
edge see you afore though, not even in court. Yet, I go there a mortal
sight of times in the course of the year, taking one day with another.”
“I never go there,” said Mr. Jarndyce (which he never did on any
consideration). “I would sooner go—somewhere else.”
“Would you though?” returned Krook, grinning. “You’re bearing hard
upon my noble and learned brother in your meaning, sir, though per-
haps it is but nat’ral in a Jarndyce. The burnt child, sir! What, you’re
looking at my lodger’s birds, Mr. Jarndyce?” The old man had come by
little and little into the room until he now touched my guardian with his
elbow and looked close up into his face with his spectacled eyes. “It’s one
of her strange ways that she’ll never tell the names of these birds if she can
help it, though she named ‘em all.” This was in a whisper. “Shall I run ‘em
over, Flite?” he asked aloud, winking at us and pointing at her as she turned
away, affecting to sweep the grate.
“If you like,” she answered hurriedly.
The old man, looking up at the cages after another look at us,
went through the list.
“Hope, Joy, Youth, Peace, Rest, Life, Dust, Ashes, Waste, Want,
Ruin, Despair, Madness, Death, Cunning, Folly, Words, Wigs, Rags,
Sheepskin, Plunder, Precedent, Jargon, Gammon, and Spinach. That’s
the whole collection,” said the old man, “all cooped up together, by
my noble and learned brother.”
“This is a bitter wind!” muttered my guardian.
“When my noble and learned brother gives his judgment, they’re
to be let go free,” said Krook, winking at us again. “And then,” he
added, whispering and grinning, “if that ever was to happen—which
it won’t—the birds that have never been caged would kill ‘em.”
“If ever the wind was in the east,” said my guardian, pretending to
look out of the window for a weathercock, “I think it’s there to-day!”
We found it very difficult to get away from the house. It was not
Miss Flite who detained us; she was as reasonable a little creature in
consulting the convenience of others as there possibly could be. It
was Mr. Krook. He seemed unable to detach himself from Mr.
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CHAPTER XV
Bell Yard
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body else, was not at first sight prepossessing; yet he was scarcely
seated before Mr. Quale asked Ada and me, not inaudibly, whether
he was not a great creature—which he certainly was, flabbily speak-
ing, though Mr. Quale meant in intellectual beauty—and whether
we were not struck by his massive configuration of brow. In short,
we heard of a great many missions of various sorts among this set of
people, but nothing respecting them was half so clear to us as that it
was Mr. Quale’s mission to be in ecstasies with everybody else’s mis-
sion and that it was the most popular mission of all.
Mr. Jarndyce had fallen into this company in the tenderness of his
heart and his earnest desire to do all the good in his power; but that
he felt it to be too often an unsatisfactory company, where benevo-
lence took spasmodic forms, where charity was assumed as a regular
uniform by loud professors and speculators in cheap notoriety, vehe-
ment in profession, restless and vain in action, servile in the last de-
gree of meanness to the great, adulatory of one another, and intoler-
able to those who were anxious quietly to help the weak from failing
rather than with a great deal of bluster and self-laudation to raise
them up a little way when they were down, he plainly told us. When
a testimonial was originated to Mr. Quale by Mr. Gusher (who had
already got one, originated by Mr. Quale), and when Mr. Gusher
spoke for an hour and a half on the subject to a meeting, including
two charity schools of small boys and girls, who were specially re-
minded of the widow’s mite, and requested to come forward with
halfpence and be acceptable sacrifices, I think the wind was in the
east for three whole weeks.
I mention this because I am coming to Mr. Skimpole again. It
seemed to me that his off-hand professions of childishness and care-
lessness were a great relief to my guardian, by contrast with such
things, and were the more readily believed in since to find one per-
fectly undesigning and candid man among many opposites could
not fail to give him pleasure. I should be sorry to imply that Mr.
Skimpole divined this and was politic; I really never understood him
well enough to know. What he was to my guardian, he certainly was
to the rest of the world.
He had not been very well; and thus, though he lived in London,
we had seen nothing of him until now. He appeared one morning in
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womanly sort of bonnet much too large for her and drying her bare
arms on a womanly sort of apron. Her fingers were white and
wrinkled with washing, and the soap-suds were yet smoking which
she wiped off her arms. But for this, she might have been a child
playing at washing and imitating a poor working-woman with a quick
observation of the truth.
She had come running from some place in the neighbourhood
and had made all the haste she could. Consequently, though she was
very light, she was out of breath and could not speak at first, as she
stood panting, and wiping her arms, and looking quietly at us.
“Oh, here’s Charley!” said the boy.
The child he was nursing stretched forth its arms and cried out to
be taken by Charley. The little girl took it, in a womanly sort of
manner belonging to the apron and the bonnet, and stood looking at
us over the burden that clung to her most affectionately.
“Is it possible,” whispered my guardian as we put a chair for the little
creature and got her to sit down with her load, the boy keeping close
to her, holding to her apron, “that this child works for the rest? Look at
this! For God’s sake, look at this!”
It was a thing to look at. The three children close together, and
two of them relying solely on the third, and the third so young and
yet with an air of age and steadiness that sat so strangely on the child-
ish figure.
“Charley, Charley!” said my guardian. “How old are you?”
“Over thirteen, sir,” replied the child.
“Oh! What a great age,” said my guardian. “What a great age, Charley!”
I cannot describe the tenderness with which he spoke to her, half
playfully yet all the more compassionately and mournfully.
“And do you live alone here with these babies, Charley?” said my
guardian.
“Yes, sir,” returned the child, looking up into his face with
perfect confidence, “since father died.”
“And how do you live, Charley? Oh! Charley,” said my guardian,
turning his face away for a moment, “how do you live?”
“Since father died, sir, I’ve gone out to work. I’m out washing to-day.”
“God help you, Charley!” said my guardian. “You’re not tall enough
to reach the tub!”
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“In pattens I am, sir,” she said quickly. “I’ve got a high pair as
belonged to mother.”
“And when did mother die? Poor mother!”
“Mother died just after Emma was born,” said the child, glancing
at the face upon her bosom. “Then father said I was to be as good a
mother to her as I could. And so I tried. And so I worked at home
and did cleaning and nursing and washing for a long time before I
began to go out. And that’s how I know how; don’t you see, sir?”
“And do you often go out?”
“As often as I can,” said Charley, opening her eyes and smiling,
“because of earning sixpences and shillings!”
“And do you always lock the babies up when you go out?”
‘To keep ‘em safe, sir, don’t you see?” said Charley. “Mrs. Blinder comes
up now and then, and Mr. Gridley comes up sometimes, and perhaps I
can run in sometimes, and they can play you know, and Tom an’t afraid of
being locked up, are you, Tom?”
‘“No-o!” said Tom stoutly.
“When it comes on dark, the lamps are lighted down in the court,
and they show up here quite bright—almost quite bright. Don’t they,
Tom?”
“Yes, Charley,” said Tom, “almost quite bright.”
“Then he’s as good as gold,” said the little creature—Oh, in such a
motherly, womanly way! “And when Emma’s tired, he puts her to
bed. And when he’s tired he goes to bed himself. And when I come
home and light the candle and has a bit of supper, he sits up again and
has it with me. Don’t you, Tom?”
“Oh, yes, Charley!” said Tom. “That I do!” And either in this
glimpse of the great pleasure of his life or in gratitude and love for
Charley, who was all in all to him, he laid his face among the scanty
folds of her frock and passed from laughing into crying.
It was the first time since our entry that a tear had been shed among
these children. The little orphan girl had spoken of their father and
their mother as if all that sorrow were subdued by the necessity of
taking courage, and by her childish importance in being able to work,
and by her bustling busy way. But now, when Tom cried, although
she sat quite tranquil, looking quietly at us, and did not by any move-
ment disturb a hair of the head of either of her little charges, I saw
two silent tears fall down her face.
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“Have many people been kind to the children?” asked Mr. Jarndyce.
“Upon the whole, not so bad, sir,” said Mrs. Blinder; “but
certainly not so many as would have been if their father’s calling had
been different. Mr. Coavins gave a guinea, and the follerers made up
a little purse. Some neighbours in the yard that had always joked and
tapped their shoulders when he went by came forward with a little
subscription, and—in general—not so bad. Similarly with Charlotte.
Some people won’t employ her because she was a follerer’s child;
some people that do employ her cast it at her; some make a merit of
having her to work for them, with that and all her draw-backs upon
her, and perhaps pay her less and put upon her more. But she’s
patienter than others would be, and is clever too, and always willing,
up to the full mark of her strength and over. So I should say, in
general, not so bad, sir, but might be better.”
Mrs. Blinder sat down to give herself a more favourable opportu-
nity of recovering her breath, exhausted anew by so much talking
before it was fully restored. Mr. Jarndyce was turning to speak to us
when his attention was attracted by the abrupt entrance into the room
of the Mr. Gridley who had been mentioned and whom we had seen
on our way up.
“I don’t know what you may be doing here, ladies and gentle-
men,” he said, as if he resented our presence, “but you’ll excuse my
coming in. I don’t come in to stare about me. Well, Charley! Well,
Tom! Well, little one! How is it with us all to-day?”
He bent over the group in a caressing way and clearly was regarded
as a friend by the children, though his face retained its stern character
and his manner to us was as rude as it could be. My guardian noticed
it and respected it.
“No one, surely, would come here to stare about him,” he said
mildly.
“May be so, sir, may be so,” returned the other, taking Tom upon
his knee and waving him off impatiently. “I don’t want to argue with
ladies and gentlemen. I have had enough of arguing to last one man
his life.”
“You have sufficient reason, I dare say,” said Mr. Jarndyce, “for
being chafed and irritated—”
“There again!” exclaimed the man, becoming violently angry. “I
am of a quarrelsome temper. I am irascible. I am not polite!”
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died. My brother some time afterwards claimed his legacy. I and some of
my relations said that he had had a part of it already in board and lodging
and some other things. Now mind! That was the question, and nothing
else. No one disputed the will; no one disputed anything but whether
part of that three hundred pounds had been already paid or not. To settle
that question, my brother filing a bill, I was obliged to go into this
accursed Chancery; I was forced there because the law forced me and
would let me go nowhere else. Seventeen people were made defendants
to that simple suit! It first came on after two years. It was then stopped
for another two years while the master (may his head rot off!) inquired
whether I was my father’s son, about which there was no dispute at all
with any mortal creature. He then found out that there were not defen-
dants enough—remember, there were only seventeen as yet!—but that
we must have another who had been left out and must begin all over
again. The costs at that time—before the thing was begun!—were three
times the legacy. My brother would have given up the legacy, and joyful,
to escape more costs. My whole estate, left to me in that will of my
father’s, has gone in costs. The suit, still undecided, has fallen into rack,
and ruin, and despair, with everything else—and here I stand, this day!
Now, Mr. Jarndyce, in your suit there are thousands and thousands in-
volved, where in mine there are hundreds. Is mine less hard to bear or is
it harder to bear, when my whole living was in it and has been thus
shamefully sucked away?”
Mr. Jarndyce said that he condoled with him with all his heart and
that he set up no monopoly himself in being unjustly treated by this
monstrous system.
“There again!” said Mr. Gridley with no diminution of his rage.
“The system! I am told on all hands, it’s the system. I mustn’t look
to individuals. It’s the system. I mustn’t go into court and say, ‘My
Lord, I beg to know this from you—is this right or wrong? Have
you the face to tell me I have received justice and therefore am dis-
missed?’ My Lord knows nothing of it. He sits there to administer
the system. I mustn’t go to Mr. Tulkinghorn, the solicitor in Lincoln’s
Inn Fields, and say to him when he makes me furious by being so
cool and satisfied—as they all do, for I know they gain by it while I
lose, don’t I?—I mustn’t say to him, ‘I will have something out of
some one for my ruin, by fair means or foul!’ He is not responsible.
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“You are right, my child. You’re going back, Charley? Aye? Come
then, little one!” He took the youngest child on his arm, where she
was willing enough to be carried. “I shouldn’t wonder if we found a
ginger-bread soldier downstairs. Let’s go and look for him!”
He made his former rough salutation, which was not deficient in
a certain respect, to Mr. Jarndyce, and bowing slightly to us, went
downstairs to his room.
Upon that, Mr. Skimpole began to talk, for the first time since
our arrival, in his usual gay strain. He said, Well, it was really very
pleasant to see how things lazily adapted themselves to purposes.
Here was this Mr. Gridley, a man of a robust will and surprising
energy—intellectually speaking, a sort of inharmonious blacksmith—
and he could easily imagine that there Gridley was, years ago, wan-
dering about in life for something to expend his superfluous com-
bativeness upon—a sort of Young Love among the thorns—when
the Court of Chancery came in his way and accommodated him
with the exact thing he wanted. There they were, matched, ever af-
terwards! Otherwise he might have been a great general, blowing up
all sorts of towns, or he might have been a great politician, dealing in
all sorts of parliamentary rhetoric; but as it was, he and the Court of
Chancery had fallen upon each other in the pleasantest way, and no-
body was much the worse, and Gridley was, so to speak, from that
hour provided for. Then look at Coavinses! How delightfully poor
Coavinses (father of these charming children) illustrated the same
principle! He, Mr. Skimpole, himself, had
sometimes repined at the existence of Coavinses. He had found
Coavinses in his way. He could had dispensed with Coavinses. There
had been times when, if he had been a sultan, and his grand vizier had
said one morning, “What does the Commander of the Faithful re-
quire at the hands of his slave?” he might have even gone so far as to
reply, “The head of Coavinses!” But what turned out to be the case?
That, all that time, he had been giving employment to a most de-
serving man, that he had been a benefactor to Coavinses, that he had
actually been enabling Coavinses to bring up these charming chil-
dren in this agreeable way, developing these social virtues! Insomuch
that his heart had just now swelled and the tears had come into his
eyes when he had looked round the room and thought, “I was the
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CHAPTER XVI
Tom-all-Alone’s
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as if he held his name and fortune on that feudal tenure. He feels that
for a Dedlock to be laid upon his back and spasmodically twitched
and stabbed in his extremities is a liberty taken somewhere, but he
thinks, “We have all yielded to this; it belongs to us; it has for some
hundreds of years been understood that we are not to make the vaults
in the park interesting on more ignoble terms; and I submit myself
to the compromise.
And a goodly show he makes, lying in a flush of crimson and gold
in the midst of the great drawing-room before his favourite picture
of my Lady, with broad strips of sunlight shining in, down the long
perspective, through the long line of windows, and alternating with
soft reliefs of shadow. Outside, the stately oaks, rooted for ages in
the green ground which has never known ploughshare, but was still a
chase when kings rode to battle with sword and shield and rode a-
hunting with bow and arrow, bear witness to his greatness. Inside,
his forefathers, looking on him from the walls, say, “Each of us was
a passing reality here and left this coloured shadow of himself and
melted into remembrance as dreamy as the distant voices of the rooks
now lulling you to rest,” and hear their testimony to his greatness
too. And he is very great this day. And woe to Boythorn or other
daring wight who shall presumptuously contest an inch with him!
My Lady is at present represented, near Sir Leicester, by her por-
trait. She has flitted away to town, with no intention of remaining
there, and will soon flit hither again, to the confusion of the fashion-
able intelligence. The house in town is not prepared for her recep-
tion. It is muffled and dreary. Only one Mercury in powder gapes
disconsolate at the hall-window; and he mentioned last night to an-
other Mercury of his acquaintance, also accustomed to good society,
that if that sort of thing was to last—which it couldn’t, for a man of
his spirits couldn’t bear it, and a man of his figure couldn’t be ex-
pected to bear it—there would be no resource for him, upon his
honour, but to cut his throat!
What connexion can there be between the place in Lincolnshire,
the house in town, the Mercury in powder, and the whereabout of
Jo the outlaw with the broom, who had that distant ray of light
upon him when he swept the churchyard-step? What connexion can
there have been between many people in the innumerable histories
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of this world who from opposite sides of great gulfs have, neverthe-
less, been very curiously brought together!
Jo sweeps his crossing all day long, unconscious of the link, if any
link there be. He sums up his mental condition when asked a ques-
tion by replying that he “don’t know nothink.” He knows that it’s
hard to keep the mud off the crossing in dirty weather, and harder
still to live by doing it. Nobody taught him even that much; he
found it out.
Jo lives—that is to say, Jo has not yet died—in a ruinous place known
to the like of him by the name of Tom-all-Alone’s. It is a black, dilapi-
dated street, avoided by all decent people, where the crazy houses were
seized upon, when their decay was far advanced, by some bold vagrants
who after establishing their own possession took to letting them out
in lodgings. Now, these tumbling tenements contain, by night, a swarm
of misery. As on the ruined human wretch vermin parasites appear, so
these ruined shelters have bred a crowd of foul existence that crawls in
and out of gaps in walls and boards; and coils itself to sleep, in maggot
numbers, where the rain drips in; and comes and goes, fetching and
carrying fever and sowing more evil in its every footprint than Lord
Coodle, and Sir Thomas Doodle, and the Duke of Foodle, and all the
fine gentlemen in office, down to Zoodle, shall set right in five hun-
dred years—though born expressly to do it.
Twice lately there has been a crash and a cloud of dust, like the
springing of a mine, in Tom-all-Alone’s; and each time a house has
fallen. These accidents have made a paragraph in the newspapers and
have filled a bed or two in the nearest hospital. The gaps remain, and
there are not unpopular lodgings among the rubbish. As several more
houses are nearly ready to go, the next crash in Tom-all-Alone’s may
be expected to be a good one.
This desirable property is in Chancery, of course. It would be an
insult to the discernment of any man with half an eye to tell him so.
Whether “Tom” is the popular representative of the original plaintiff
or defendant in Jarndyce and Jarndyce, or whether Tom lived here
when the suit had laid the street waste, all alone, until other settlers
came to join him, or whether the traditional title is a comprehensive
name for a retreat cut off from honest company and put out of the
pale of hope, perhaps nobody knows. Certainly Jo don’t know.
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whirl; all that unaccountable reading and writing, which has been
suspended for a few hours, recommences. Jo and the other lower
animals get on in the unintelligible mess as they can. It is market-day.
The blinded oxen, over-goaded, over-driven, never guided, run into
wrong places and are beaten out, and plunge red-eyed and foaming at
stone walls, and often sorely hurt the innocent, and often sorely hurt
themselves. Very like Jo and his order; very, very like!
A band of music comes and plays. Jo listens to it. So does a dog—
a drover’s dog, waiting for his master outside a butcher’s shop, and
evidently thinking about those sheep he has had upon his mind for
some hours and is happily rid of. He seems perplexed respecting
three or four, can’t remember where he left them, looks up and down
the street as half expecting to see them astray, suddenly pricks up his
ears and remembers all about it. A thoroughly vagabond dog, accus-
tomed to low company and public-houses; a terrific dog to sheep,
ready at a whistle to scamper over their backs and tear out mouthfuls
of their wool; but an educated, improved, developed dog who has
been taught his duties and knows how to discharge them. He and Jo
listen to the music, probably with much the same amount of animal
satisfaction; likewise as to awakened association, aspiration, or re-
gret, melancholy or joyful reference to things beyond the senses, they
are probably upon a par. But, otherwise, how far above the human
listener is the brute!
Turn that dog’s descendants wild, like Jo, and in a very few years
they will so degenerate that they will lose even their bark—but not
their bite.
The day changes as it wears itself away and becomes dark and driz-
zly. Jo fights it out at his crossing among the mud and wheels, the
horses, whips, and umbrellas, and gets but a scanty sum to pay for
the unsavoury shelter of Tom-all-Alone’s. Twilight comes on; gas
begins to start up in the shops; the lamplighter, with his ladder, runs
along the margin of the pavement. A wretched evening is beginning
to close in.
In his chambers Mr. Tulkinghorn sits meditating an application to
the nearest magistrate to-morrow morning for a warrant. Gridley, a
disappointed suitor, has been here to-day and has been alarming. We
are not to be put in bodily fear, and that ill-conditioned fellow shall
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of what she has said herself. She draws off her glove to get some
money from her purse. Jo silently notices how white and small her
hand is and what a jolly servant she must be to wear such sparkling
rings.
She drops a piece of money in his hand without touching it, and
shuddering as their hands approach. “Now,” she adds, “show me the
spot again!”
Jo thrusts the handle of his broom between the bars of the gate,
and with his utmost power of elaboration, points it out. At length,
looking aside to see if he has made himself intelligible, he finds that
he is alone.
His first proceeding is to hold the piece of money to the gas-light
and to be overpowered at finding that it is yellow—gold. His next is
to give it a one-sided bite at the edge as a test of its quality. His next, to
put it in his mouth for safety and to sweep the step and passage with
great care. His job done, he sets off for Tom-all-Alone’s, stopping in
the light of innumerable gas-lamps to produce the piece of gold and
give it another one-sided bite as a reassurance of its being genuine.
The Mercury in powder is in no want of society to-night, for my
Lady goes to a grand dinner and three or four balls. Sir Leicester is
fidgety down at Chesney Wold, with no better company than the
goat; he complains to Mrs. Rouncewell that the rain makes such a
monotonous pattering on the terrace that he can’t read the paper
even by the fireside in his own snug dressing-room.
“Sir Leicester would have done better to try the other side of the
house, my dear,” says Mrs. Rouncewell to Rosa. “His dressing-room
is on my Lady’s side. And in all these years I never heard the step
upon the Ghost’s Walk more distinct than it is to-night!”
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CHAPTER XVII
Esther’s Narrative
RICHARD VERY OFTEN came to see us while we remained in London
(though he soon failed in his letter-writing), and with his quick abili-
ties, his good spirits, his good temper, his gaiety and freshness, was
always delightful. But though I liked him more and more the better
I knew him, I still felt more and more how much it was to be regret-
ted that he had been educated in no habits of application and con-
centration. The system which had addressed him in exactly the same
manner as it had addressed hundreds of other boys, all varying in
character and capacity, had enabled him to dash through his tasks,
always with fair credit and often with distinction, but in a fitful,
dazzling way that had confirmed his reliance on those very qualities
in himself which it had been most desirable to direct and train. They
were good qualities, without which no high place can be meritori-
ously won, but like fire and water, though excellent servants, they
were very bad masters. If they had been under Richard’s direction,
they would have been his friends; but Richard being under their di-
rection, they became his enemies.
I write down these opinions not because I believe that this or any
other thing was so because I thought so, but only because I did think
so and I want to be quite candid about all I thought and did. These
were my thoughts about Richard. I thought I often observed besides
how right my guardian was in what he had said, and that the uncer-
tainties and delays of the Chancery suit had imparted to his nature
something of the careless spirit of a gamester who felt that he was
part of a great gaming system.
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“He can’t say better than that, Esther, can he?” cried my pet trium-
phantly. I tried to look at my pet in the wisest manner, but of course
I couldn’t.
“Well enough?” I repeated.
“Yes,” said Richard, “well enough. It’s rather jog-trotty and hum-
drum. But it’ll do as well as anything else!”
“Oh! My dear Richard!” I remonstrated.
“What’s the matter?” said Richard.
“Do as well as anything else!”
“I don’t think there’s any harm in that, Dame Durden,” said Ada,
looking so confidingly at me across him; “because if it will do as well as
anything else, it will do very well, I hope.”
“Oh, yes, I hope so,” returned Richard, carelessly tossing his hair
from his forehead. “After all, it may be only a kind of probation till
our suit is—I forgot though. I am not to mention the suit. Forbid-
den ground! Oh, yes, it’s all right enough. Let us talk about some-
thing else.”
Ada would have done so willingly, and with a full persuasion that
we had brought the question to a most satisfactory state. But I
thought it would be useless to stop there, so I began again.
“No, but Richard,” said I, “and my dear Ada! Consider how im-
portant it is to you both, and what a point of honour it is towards
your cousin, that you, Richard, should be quite in earnest without
any reservation. I think we had better talk about this, really, Ada. It
will be too late very soon.”
“Oh, yes! We must talk about it!” said Ada. “But I think Richard
is right.”
What was the use of my trying to look wise when she was so
pretty, and so engaging, and so fond of him!
“Mr. and Mrs. Badger were here yesterday, Richard,” said I, “and
they seemed disposed to think that you had no great liking for the
profession.”
“Did they though?” said Richard. “Oh! Well, that rather alters the
case, because I had no idea that they thought so, and I should not
have liked to disappoint or inconvenience them. The fact is, I don’t
care much about it. But, oh, it don’t matter! It’ll do as well as any-
thing else!”
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but how could I do it, or how could it have any effect if I could, while
Ada rested her clasped hands upon his shoulder and while he looked at
her tender blue eyes, and while they looked at him!
“You see, my precious girl,” said Richard, passing her golden curls
through and through his hand, “I was a little hasty perhaps; or I
misunderstood my own inclinations perhaps. They don’t seem to lie
in that direction. I couldn’t tell till I tried. Now the question is whether
it’s worth-while to undo all that has been done. It seems like making
a great disturbance about nothing particular.”
“My dear Richard,” said I, “how can you say about nothing par-
ticular?”
“I don’t mean absolutely that,” he returned. “I mean that it may be
nothing particular because I may never want it.”
Both Ada and I urged, in reply, not only that it was decidedly
worth-while to undo what had been done, but that it must be un-
done. I then asked Richard whether he had thought of any more
congenial pursuit.
“There, my dear Mrs. Shipton,” said Richard, “you touch me home.
Yes, I have. I have been thinking that the law is the boy for me.”
“The law!” repeated Ada as if she were afraid of the name.
“If I went into Kenge’s office,” said Richard, “and if I were
placed under articles to Kenge, I should have my eye on the—hum!—
the forbidden ground—and should be able to study it, and master it,
and to satisfy myself that it was not neglected and was being properly
conducted. I should be able to look after Ada’s interests and my own
interests (the same thing!); and I should peg away at Blackstone and
all those fellows with the most tremendous ardour.”
I was not by any means so sure of that, and I saw how his hanker-
ing after the vague things yet to come of those long-deferred hopes
cast a shade on Ada’s face. But I thought it best to encourage him in
any project of continuous exertion, and only advised him to be quite
sure that his mind was made up now.
“My dear Minerva,” said Richard, “I am as steady as you are. I
made a mistake; we are all liable to mistakes; I won’t do so any more,
and I’ll become such a lawyer as is not often seen. That is, you know,”
said Richard, relapsing into doubt, “if it really is worth-while, after
all, to make such a disturbance about nothing particular!”
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This led to our saying again, with a great deal of gravity, all that we
had said already and to our coming to much the same conclusion
afterwards. But we so strongly advised Richard to be frank and open
with Mr. Jarndyce, without a moment’s delay, and his disposition
was naturally so opposed to concealment that he sought him out at
once (taking us with him) and made a full avowal. “Rick,” said my
guardian, after hearing him attentively, “we can retreat with honour,
and we will. But we must he careful—for our cousin s sake, Rick, for
our cousin’s sake—that we make no more such mistakes. Therefore,
in the matter of the law, we will have a
good trial before we decide. We will look before we leap, and take
plenty of time about it.”
Richard’s energy was of such an impatient and fitful kind that he
would have liked nothing better than to have gone to Mr. Kenge’s
office in that hour and to have entered into articles with him on the
spot. Submitting, however, with a good grace to the caution that we
had shown to be so necessary, he contented himself with sitting down
among us in his lightest spirits and talking as if his one unvarying
purpose in life from childhood had been that one which now held
possession of him. My guardian was very kind and cordial with him,
but rather grave, enough so to cause Ada, when he had departed and
we were going upstairs to bed, to say, “Cousin John, I hope you don’t
think the worse of Richard?”
“No, my love,” said he.
“Because it was very natural that Richard should be mistaken in
such a difficult case. It is not uncommon.”
“No, no, my love,” said he. “Don’t look unhappy.”
“Oh, I am not unhappy, cousin John!” said Ada, smiling cheer-
fully, with her hand upon his shoulder, where she had put it in bid-
ding him good night. “But I should be a little so if you thought at all
the worse of Richard.”
“My dear,” said Mr. Jarndyce, “I should think the worse of him
only if you were ever in the least unhappy through his means. I should
be more disposed to quarrel with myself even then, than with poor
Rick, for I brought you together. But, tut, all this is nothing! He has
time before him, and the race to run. I think the worse of him? Not
I, my loving cousin! And not you, I swear!”
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with at that time and sat down to it with great determination. It was
necessary to count all the stitches in that work, and I resolved to go on
with it until I couldn’t keep my eyes open, and then to go to bed.
I soon found myself very busy. But I had left some silk downstairs
in a work-table drawer in the temporary growlery, and coming to a
stop for want of it, I took my candle and went softly down to get it.
To my great surprise, on going in I found my guardian still there,
and sitting looking at the ashes. He was lost in thought, his book lay
unheeded by his side, his silvered iron-grey hair was scattered con-
fusedly upon his forehead as though his hand had been wandering
among it while his thoughts were elsewhere, and his face looked
worn. Almost frightened by coming upon him so unexpectedly, I
stood still for a moment and should have retired without speaking
had he not, in again passing his hand abstractedly through his hair,
seen me and started.
“Esther!”
I told him what I had come for.
“At work so late, my dear?”
“I am working late to-night,” said I, “because I couldn’t sleep and
wished to tire myself. But, dear guardian, you are late too, and look
weary. You have no trouble, I hope, to keep you waking?”
“None, little woman, that you would readily understand,” said he.
He spoke in a regretful tone so new to me that I inwardly re-
peated, as if that would help me to his meaning, “That I could readily
understand!”
“Remain a moment, Esther,” said he, “You were in my thoughts.”
“I hope I was not the trouble, guardian?”
He slightly waved his hand and fell into his usual manner. The
change was so remarkable, and he appeared to make it by dint of so
much self-command, that I found myself again inwardly repeating,
“None that I could understand!”
“Little woman,” said my guardian, “I was thinking—that is, I have
been thinking since I have been sitting here—that you ought to know
of your own history all I know. It is very little. Next to nothing.”
“Dear guardian,” I replied, “when you spoke to me before on that
subject—”
“But since then,” he gravely interposed, anticipating what I meant
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to say, “I have reflected that your having anything to ask me, and my
having anything to tell you, are different considerations, Esther. It is
perhaps my duty to impart to you the little I know.”
“If you think so, guardian, it is right.”
“I think so,” he returned very gently, and kindly, and very
distinctly. “My dear, I think so now. If any real disadvantage
can attach to your position in the mind of any man or woman worth
a thought, it is right that you at least of all the world should not
magnify it to yourself by having vague impressions of its nature.”
I sat down and said after a little effort to be as calm as I ought to
be, “One of my earliest remembrances, guardian, is of these words:
‘Your mother, Esther, is your disgrace, and you were hers. The time
will come, and soon enough, when you will understand this better,
and will feel it too, as no one save a woman can.’” I had covered my
face with my hands in repeating the words, but I took them away
now with a better kind of shame, I hope, and told him that to him
I owed the blessing that I had from my childhood to that hour
never, never, never felt it. He put up his hand as if to stop me. I
well knew that he was never to be thanked, and said no more.
“Nine years, my dear,” he said after thinking for a little while, “have
passed since I received a letter from a lady living in seclusion, written
with a stern passion and power that rendered it unlike all other letters
I have ever read. It was written to me (as it told me in so many words),
perhaps because it was the writer’s idiosyncrasy to put that trust in me,
perhaps because it was mine to justify it. It told me of a child, an
orphan girl then twelve years old, in some such cruel words as those
which live in your remembrance. It told me that the writer had bred
her in secrecy from her birth, had blotted out all trace of her existence,
and that if the writer were to die before the child became a woman, she
would be left entirely friendless, nameless, and unknown. It asked me
to consider if I would, in that case, finish what the writer had begun.”
I listened in silence and looked attentively at him.
“Your early recollection, my dear, will supply the gloomy medium
through which all this was seen and expressed by the writer, and the
distorted religion which clouded her mind with impressions of the need
there was for the child to expiate an offence of which she was quite
innocent. I felt concerned for the little creature, in her darkened life, and
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things lie here,” said Caddy, adjusting them with a careful hand, “be-
cause I was present myself, and I shouldn’t wonder if somebody left
them on purpose!”
“Do they look like that sort of thing?” said Ada, coming laughingly
behind me and clasping me merrily round the waist. “Oh, yes, indeed
they do, Dame Durden! They look very, very like that sort of thing.
Oh, very like it indeed, my dear!”
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CHAPTER XVIII
Lady Dedlock
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us at that time of the year very well, but he was in the full novelty of
his new position and was making most energetic attempts to unravel
the mysteries of the fatal suit. Consequently we went without him,
and my darling was delighted to praise him for being so busy.
We made a pleasant journey down into Lincolnshire by the coach
and had an entertaining companion in Mr. Skimpole. His furniture
had been all cleared off, it appeared, by the person who took posses-
sion of it on his blue-eyed daughter’s birthday, but he seemed quite
relieved to think that it was gone. Chairs and table, he said, were
wearisome objects; they were monotonous ideas, they had no variety
of expression, they looked you out of countenance, and you looked
them out of countenance. How pleasant, then, to be bound to no
particular chairs and tables, but to sport like a butterfly among all the
furniture on hire, and to flit from rosewood to mahogany, and from
mahogany to walnut, and from this shape to that, as the humour
took one!
“The oddity of the thing is,” said Mr. Skimpole with a quickened
sense of the ludicrous, “that my chairs and tables were not paid for, and
yet my landlord walks off with them as composedly as possible. Now,
that seems droll! There is something grotesque in it. The chair and
table merchant never engaged to pay my landlord my rent. Why should
my landlord quarrel with him? If I have a pimple on my nose which is
disagreeable to my landlord’s peculiar ideas of beauty, my landlord has
no business to scratch my chair and table merchant’s nose, which has
no pimple on it. His reasoning seems defective!”
“Well,” said my guardian good-humouredly, “it’s pretty clear that
whoever became security for those chairs and tables will have to pay
for them.”
“Exactly!” returned Mr. Skimpole. “That’s the crowning point of
unreason in the business! I said to my landlord, ‘My good man, you
are not aware that my excellent friend Jarndyce will have to pay for
those things that you are sweeping off in that indelicate manner.
Have you no consideration for his property?’ He hadn’t the least.”
“And refused all proposals,” said my guardian.
“Refused all proposals,” returned Mr. Skimpole. “I made him busi-
ness proposals. I had him into my room. I said, ‘You are a man of
business, I believe?’ He replied, ‘I am,’ ‘Very well,’ said I, ‘now let us
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be business-like. Here is an inkstand, here are pens and paper, here are
wafers. What do you want? I have occupied your house for a consid-
erable period, I believe to our mutual satisfaction until this unpleas-
ant misunderstanding arose; let us be at once friendly and business-
like. What do you want?’ In reply to this, he made use of the figura-
tive expression—which has something Eastern about it—that he had
never seen the colour of my money. ‘My amiable friend,’ said I, ‘I
never have any money. I never know anything about money.’ ‘Well,
sir,’ said he, ‘what do you offer if I give you time?’ ‘My good fellow,’
said I, ‘I have no idea of time; but you say you are a man of business,
and whatever you can suggest to be done in a business-like way with
pen, and ink, and paper—and wafers—I am ready to do. Don’t pay
yourself at another man’s expense (which is foolish), but be business-
like!’ However, he wouldn’t be, and there was an end of it.”
If these were some of the inconveniences of Mr. Skimpole’s child-
hood, it assuredly possessed its advantages too. On the journey he
had a very good appetite for such refreshment as came in our way
(including a basket of choice hothouse peaches), but never thought
of paying for anything. So when the coachman came round for his
fee, he pleasantly asked him what he considered a very good fee in-
deed, now—a liberal one—and on his replying half a crown for a
single passenger, said it was little enough too, all things considered,
and left Mr. Jarndyce to give it him.
It was delightful weather. The green corn waved so beautifully, the
larks sang so joyfully, the hedges were so full of wild flowers, the
trees were so thickly out in leaf, the bean-fields, with a light wind
blowing over them, filled the air with such a delicious fragrance! Late
in the afternoon we came to the market-town where we were to
alight from the coach—a dull little town with a church-spire, and a
marketplace, and a market-cross, and one intensely sunny street, and
a pond with an old horse cooling his legs in it, and a very few men
sleepily lying and standing about in narrow little bits of shade. After
the rustling of the leaves and the waving of the corn all along the
road, it looked as still, as hot, as motionless a little town as England
could produce.
At the inn we found Mr. Boythorn on horseback, waiting with an
open carriage to take us to his house, which was a few miles off. He
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there was one great flush of roses, seemed scarcely real in its light
solidity and in the serene and peaceful hush that rested on all around
it. To Ada and to me, that above all appeared the pervading influ-
ence. On everything, house, garden, terrace, green slopes, water, old
oaks, fern, moss, woods again, and far away across the openings in
the prospect to the distance lying wide before us with a purple bloom
upon it, there seemed to be such undisturbed repose.
When we came into the little village and passed a small inn with
the sign of the Dedlock Arms swinging over the road in front, Mr.
Boythorn interchanged greetings with a young gentleman sitting on
a bench outside the inn-door who had some fishing-tackle lying be-
side him.
“That’s the housekeeper’s grandson, Mr. Rouncewell by name,”
said, he, “and he is in love with a pretty girl up at the house. Lady
Dedlock has taken a fancy to the pretty girl and is going to keep her
about her own fair person—an honour which my young friend him-
self does not at all appreciate. However, he can’t marry just yet, even
if his Rosebud were willing; so he is fain to make the best of it. In the
meanwhile, he comes here pretty often for a day or two at a time
to—fish. Ha ha ha ha!”
“Are he and the pretty girl engaged, Mr. Boythorn?” asked Ada.
“Why, my dear Miss Clare,” he returned, “I think they may per-
haps understand each other; but you will see them soon, I dare say,
and I must learn from you on such a point—not you from me.”
Ada blushed, and Mr. Boythorn, trotting forward on his comely
grey horse, dismounted at his own door and stood ready with ex-
tended arm and uncovered head to welcome us when we arrived.
He lived in a pretty house, formerly the parsonage house, with a
lawn in front, a bright flower-garden at the side, and a well-stocked
orchard and kitchen-garden in the rear, enclosed with a venerable
wall that had of itself a ripened ruddy look. But, indeed, everything
about the place wore an aspect of maturity and abundance. The old
lime-tree walk was like green cloisters, the very shadows of the cherry-
trees and apple-trees were heavy with fruit, the gooseberry-bushes
were so laden that their branches arched and rested on the earth, the
strawberries and raspberries grew in like profusion, and the peaches
basked by the hundred on the wall. Tumbled about among the spread
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nets and the glass frames sparkling and winking in the sun there were
such heaps of drooping pods, and marrows, and cucumbers, that
every foot of ground appeared a vegetable treasury, while the smell of
sweet herbs and all kinds of wholesome growth (to say nothing of
the neighbouring meadows where the hay was carrying) made the
whole air a great nosegay. Such stillness and composure reigned within
the orderly precincts of the old red wall that even the feathers hung
in garlands to scare the birds hardly stirred; and the wall had such a
ripening influence that where, here and there high up, a disused nail
and scrap of list still clung to it, it was easy to fancy that they had
mellowed with the changing seasons and that they had rusted and
decayed according to the common fate.
The house, though a little disorderly in comparison with the gar-
den, was a real old house with settles in the chimney of the brick-
floored kitchen and great beams across the ceilings. On one side of it
was the terrible piece of ground in dispute, where Mr. Boythorn main-
tained a sentry in a smock-frock day and night, whose duty was sup-
posed to be, in cases of aggression, immediately to ring a large bell
hung up there for the purpose, to unchain a great bull-dog established
in a kennel as his ally, and generally to deal destruction on the enemy.
Not content with these precautions, Mr. Boythorn had himself com-
posed and posted there, on painted boards to which his name was
attached in large letters, the following solemn warnings: “Beware of
the bull-dog. He is most ferocious. Lawrence Boythorn.” “The
blunderbus is loaded with slugs. Lawrence Boythorn.” “Man-traps and
spring-guns are set here at all times of the day and night. Lawrence
Boythorn.” “Take notice. That any person or persons audaciously pre-
suming to trespass on this property will be punished with the utmost
severity of private chastisement and prosecuted with the utmost rigour
of the law. Lawrence Boythorn.” These he showed us from the draw-
ing-room window, while his bird was hopping about his head, and he
laughed, “Ha ha ha ha! Ha ha ha ha!” to that extent as he pointed them
out that I really thought he would have hurt himself.
“But this is taking a good deal of trouble,” said Mr. Skimpole in his
light way, “when you are not in earnest after all.”
“Not in earnest!” returned Mr. Boythorn with unspeakable warmth.
“Not in earnest! If I could have hoped to train him, I would have
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bought a lion instead of that dog and would have turned him loose
upon the first intolerable robber who should dare to make an en-
croachment on my rights. Let Sir Leicester Dedlock consent to come
out and decide this question by single combat, and I will meet him
with any weapon known to mankind in any age or country. I am
that much in earnest. Not more!”
We arrived at his house on a Saturday. On the Sunday morning we
all set forth to walk to the little church in the park. Entering the
park, almost immediately by the disputed ground, we pursued a pleas-
ant footpath winding among the verdant turf and the beautiful trees
until it brought us to the church-porch.
The congregation was extremely small and quite a rustic one with
the exception of a large muster of servants from the house, some of
whom were already in their seats, while others were yet dropping in.
There were some stately footmen, and there was a perfect picture of
an old coachman, who looked as if he were the official representative
of all the pomps and vanities that had ever been put into his coach.
There was a very pretty show of young women, and above them, the
handsome old face and fine responsible portly figure of the house-
keeper towered pre-eminent. The pretty girl of whom Mr. Boythorn
had told us was close by her. She was so very pretty that I might have
known her by her beauty even if I had not seen how blushingly con-
scious she was of the eyes of the young fisherman, whom I discov-
ered not far off. One face, and not an agreeable one, though it was
handsome, seemed maliciously watchful of this pretty girl, and in-
deed of every one and everything there. It was a Frenchwoman’s.
As the bell was yet ringing and the great people were not yet come,
I had leisure to glance over the church, which smelt as earthy as a
grave, and to think what a shady, ancient, solemn little church it was.
The windows, heavily shaded by trees, admitted a subdued light that
made the faces around me pale, and darkened the old brasses in the
pavement and the time and damp-worn monuments, and rendered
the sunshine in the little porch, where a monotonous ringer was
working at the bell, inestimably bright. But a stir in that direction, a
gathering of reverential awe in the rustic faces, and a blandly fero-
cious assumption on the part of Mr. Boythorn of being resolutely
unconscious of somebody’s existence forewarned me that the great
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people were come and that the service was going to begin.
“‘Enter not into judgment with thy servant, O Lord, for in thy
sight—’”
Shall I ever forget the rapid beating at my heart, occasioned by the
look I met as I stood up! Shall I ever forget the manner in which
those handsome proud eyes seemed to spring out of their languor
and to hold mine! It was only a moment before I cast mine down—
released again, if I may say so—on my book; but I knew the beauti-
ful face quite well in that short space of time.
And, very strangely, there was something quickened within me,
associated with the lonely days at my godmother’s; yes, away even to
the days when I had stood on tiptoe to dress myself at my little glass
after dressing my doll. And this, although I had never seen this lady’s
face before in all my life—I was quite sure of it—absolutely certain.
It was easy to know that the ceremonious, gouty, grey-haired gentle-
man, the only other occupant of the great pew, was Sir Leicester
Dedlock, and that the lady was Lady Dedlock. But why her face
should be, in a confused way, like a broken glass to me, in which I
saw scraps of old remembrances, and why I should be so fluttered
and troubled (for I was still) by having casually met her eyes, I could
not think.
I felt it to be an unmeaning weakness in me and tried to overcome
it by attending to the words I heard. Then, very strangely, I seemed
to hear them, not in the reader’s voice, but in the well-remembered
voice of my godmother. This made me think, did Lady Dedlock’s
face accidentally resemble my godmother’s? It might be that it did, a
little; but the expression was so different, and the stern decision which
had worn into my godmother’s face, like weather into rocks, was so
completely wanting in the face before me that it could not be that
resemblance which had struck me. Neither did I know the loftiness
and haughtiness of Lady Dedlock’s face, at all, in any one. And yet
I—I, little Esther Summerson, the child who lived a life apart and on
whose birthday there was no rejoicing—seemed to arise before my
own eyes, evoked out of the past by some power in this fashionable
lady, whom I not only entertained no fancy that I had ever seen, but
whom I perfectly well knew I had never seen until that hour.
It made me tremble so to be thrown into this unaccountable agita-
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tance and felt the large raindrops rattle through the leaves.
The weather had been all the week extremely sultry, but the storm
broke so suddenly—upon us, at least, in that sheltered spot—that
before we reached the outskirts of the wood the thunder and light-
ning were frequent and the rain came plunging through the leaves as
if every drop were a great leaden bead. As it was not a time for stand-
ing among trees, we ran out of the wood, and up and down the
moss-grown steps which crossed the plantation-fence like two broad-
staved ladders placed back to back, and made for a keeper’s lodge
which was close at hand. We had often noticed the dark beauty of
this lodge standing in a deep twilight of trees, and how the ivy clus-
tered over it, and how there was a steep hollow near, where we had
once seen the keeper’s dog dive down into the fern as if it were water.
The lodge was so dark within, now the sky was overcast, that we
only clearly saw the man who came to the door when we took shel-
ter there and put two chairs for Ada and me. The lattice-windows
were all thrown open, and we sat just within the doorway watching
the storm. It was grand to see how the wind awoke, and bent the
trees, and drove the rain before it like a cloud of smoke; and to hear
the solemn thunder and to see the lightning; and while thinking
with awe of the tremendous powers by which our little lives are
encompassed, to consider how beneficent they are and how upon the
smallest flower and leaf there was already a freshness poured from all
this seeming rage which seemed to make creation new again.
“Is it not dangerous to sit in so exposed a place?”
“Oh, no, Esther dear!” said Ada quietly.
Ada said it to me, but I had not spoken.
The beating of my heart came back again. I had never heard the
voice, as I had never seen the face, but it affected me in the same
strange way. Again, in a moment, there arose before my mind innu-
merable pictures of myself.
Lady Dedlock had taken shelter in the lodge before our arrival
there and had come out of the gloom within. She stood behind
my chair with her hand upon it. I saw her with her hand close to
my shoulder when I turned my head.
“I have frightened you?” she said.
No. It was not fright. Why should I be frightened!
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Lady Dedlock looked at me, and I looked at her and said I was
indeed. All at once she turned from me with a hasty air, almost expres-
sive of displeasure or dislike, and spoke to him over her shoulder again.
“Ages have passed since we were in the habit of meeting, Mr.
Jarndyce.”
“A long time. At least I thought it was a long time, until I saw you
last Sunday,” he returned.
“What! Even you are a courtier, or think it necessary to become
one to me!” she said with some disdain. “I have achieved that reputa-
tion, I suppose.”
“You have achieved so much, Lady Dedlock,” said my guardian,
“that you pay some little penalty, I dare say. But none to me.”
“So much!” she repeated, slightly laughing. “Yes!”
With her air of superiority, and power, and fascination, and I know
not what, she seemed to regard Ada and me as little more than chil-
dren. So, as she slightly laughed and afterwards sat looking at the
rain, she was as self-possessed and as free to occupy herself with her
own thoughts as if she had been alone.
“I think you knew my sister when we were abroad together better
than you know me?” she said, looking at him again.
“Yes, we happened to meet oftener,” he returned.
“We went our several ways,” said Lady Dedlock, “and had little in
common even before we agreed to differ. It is to be regretted, I sup-
pose, but it could not be helped.”
Lady Dedlock again sat looking at the rain. The storm soon began
to pass upon its way. The shower greatly abated, the lightning ceased,
the thunder rolled among the distant hills, and the sun began to
glisten on the wet leaves and the falling rain. As we sat there, silently,
we saw a little pony phaeton coming towards us at a merry pace.
“The messenger is coming back, my Lady,” said the keeper, “with
the carriage.”
As it drove up, we saw that there were two people inside. There
alighted from it, with some cloaks and wrappers, first the
Frenchwoman whom I had seen in church, and secondly the pretty
girl, the Frenchwoman with a defiant confidence, the pretty girl con-
fused and hesitating.
“What now?” said Lady Dedlock. “Two!”
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We passed not far from the house a few minutes afterwards. Peaceful as it
had looked when we first saw it, it looked even more so now, with a dia-
mond spray glittering all about it, a light wind blowing, the birds no longer
hushed but singing strongly, everything refreshed by the late rain, and the
little carriage shining at the doorway like a fairy carriage made of silver. Still,
very steadfastly and quietly walking towards it, a peaceful figure too in the
landscape, went Mademoiselle Hortense, shoeless, through the wet grass.
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CHAPTER XIX
Moving On
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man in white trousers and a white hat, with sea-bronze on the judi-
cial countenance, and a strip of bark peeled by the solar rays from the
judicial nose, who calls in at the shell-fish shop as he comes along
and drinks iced ginger-beer!
The bar of England is scattered over the face of the earth. How
England can get on through four long summer months without its
bar—which is its acknowledged refuge in adversity and its only le-
gitimate triumph in prosperity—is beside the question; assuredly that
shield and buckler of Britannia are not in present wear. The learned
gentleman who is always so tremendously indignant at the unprec-
edented outrage committed on the feelings of his client by the oppo-
site party that he never seems likely to recover it is doing infinitely
better than might be expected in Switzerland. The learned gentle-
man who does the withering business and who blights all opponents
with his gloomy sarcasm is as merry as a grig at a French watering-
place. The learned gentleman who weeps by the pint on the smallest
provocation has not shed a tear these six weeks. The very learned
gentleman who has cooled the natural heat of his gingery complex-
ion in pools and fountains of law until he has become great in knotty
arguments for term-time, when he poses the drowsy bench with le-
gal “chaff,” inexplicable to the uninitiated and to most of the initi-
ated too, is roaming, with a characteristic delight in aridity and dust,
about Constantinople. Other dispersed
fragments of the same great palladium are to be found on the canals
of Venice, at the second cataract of the Nile, in the baths of Ger-
many, and sprinkled on the sea-sand all over the English coast. Scarcely
one is to be encountered in the deserted region of Chancery Lane. If
such a lonely member of the bar do flit across the waste and come
upon a prowling suitor who is unable to leave off haunting the scenes of
his anxiety, they frighten one another and retreat into opposite shades.
It is the hottest long vacation known for many years. All the young
clerks are madly in love, and according to their various degrees, pine
for bliss with the beloved object, at Margate, Ramsgate, or Gravesend.
All the middle-aged clerks think their families too large. All the un-
owned dogs who stray into the Inns of Court and pant about stair-
cases and other dry places seeking water give short howls of aggrava-
tion. All the blind men’s dogs in the streets draw their masters against
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on! You are by no means to move off, Jo, for the great lights can’t at
all agree about that. Move on!
Mr. Snagsby says nothing to this effect, says nothing at all
indeed, but coughs his forlornest cough, expressive of no thorough-
fare in any direction. By this time Mr. and Mrs. Chadband and Mrs.
Snagsby, hearing the altercation, have appeared upon the stairs. Guster
having never left the end of the passage, the whole household are
assembled.
“The simple question is, sir,” says the constable, “whether you know
this boy. He says you do.”
Mrs. Snagsby, from her elevation, instantly cries out, “No he don’t!”
“My lit-tle woman!” says Mr. Snagsby, looking up the staircase. “My
love, permit me! Pray have a moment’s patience, my dear. I do know
something of this lad, and in what I know of him, I can’t say that
there’s any harm; perhaps on the contrary, constable.” To whom the
law-stationer relates his Joful and woful experience, suppressing the
half-crown fact.
“Well!” says the constable, “so far, it seems, he had grounds for what
he said. When I took him into custody up in Holborn, he said you
knew him. Upon that, a young man who was in the crowd said he was
acquainted with you, and you were a respectable housekeeper, and if
I’d call and make the inquiry, he’d appear. The young man don’t seem
inclined to keep his word, but— Oh! Here is the young man!”
Enter Mr. Guppy, who nods to Mr. Snagsby and touches his hat
with the chivalry of clerkship to the ladies on the stairs.
“I was strolling away from the office just now when I found this
row going on,” says Mr. Guppy to the law-stationer, “and as your
name was mentioned, I thought it was right the thing should be
looked into.”
“It was very good-natured of you, sir,” says Mr. Snagsby, “and I am
obliged to you.” And Mr. Snagsby again relates his experience, again
suppressing the half-crown fact.
“Now, I know where you live,” says the constable, then, to Jo.
“You live down in Tom-all-Alone’s. That’s a nice innocent place to
live in, ain’t it?”
“I can’t go and live in no nicer place, sir,” replies Jo. “They
wouldn’t have nothink to say to me if I wos to go to a nice innocent
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place fur to live. Who ud go and let a nice innocent lodging to such
a reg’lar one as me!”
“You are very poor, ain’t you?” says the constable.
“Yes, I am indeed, sir, wery poor in gin’ral,” replies Jo. “I leave you
to judge now! I shook these two half-crowns out of him,” says the
constable, producing them to the company, “in only putting my
hand upon him!”
“They’re wot’s left, Mr. Snagsby,” says Jo, “out of a sov-ring as wos
give me by a lady in a wale as sed she wos a servant and as come to my
crossin one night and asked to be showd this ‘ere ouse and the ouse
wot him as you giv the writin to died at, and the berrin-ground wot
he’s berrid in. She ses to me she ses ‘are you the boy at the inkwhich?’
she ses. I ses ‘yes’ I ses. She ses to me she ses ‘can you show me all them
places?’ I ses ‘yes I can’ I ses. And she ses to me ‘do it’ and I dun it and
she giv me a sov’ring and hooked it. And I an’t had much of the sov’ring
neither,” says Jo, with dirty tears, “fur I had to pay five bob, down in
Tom-all-Alone’s, afore they’d square it fur to give me change, and then
a young man he thieved another five while I was asleep and another
boy he thieved ninepence and the landlord he stood drains round with
a lot more on it.”
“You don’t expect anybody to believe this, about the lady and the
sovereign, do you?” says the constable, eyeing him aside with inef-
fable disdain.
“I don’t know as I do, sir,” replies Jo. “I don’t expect nothink
at all, sir, much, but that’s the true hist’ry on it.”
“You see what he is!” the constable observes to the audience. “Well,
Mr. Snagsby, if I don’t lock him up this time, will you engage for his
moving on?”
“No!” cries Mrs. Snagsby from the stairs.
“My little woman!” pleads her husband. “Constable, I have no
doubt he’ll move on. You know you really must do it,” says Mr.
Snagsby.
“I’m everyways agreeable, sir,” says the hapless Jo.
“Do it, then,” observes the constable. “You know what you have
got to do. Do it! And recollect you won’t get off so easy next time.
Catch hold of your money. Now, the sooner you’re five mile off, the
better for all parties.”
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With this farewell hint and pointing generally to the setting sun as
a likely place to move on to, the constable bids his auditors good
afternoon and makes the echoes of Cook’s Court perform slow mu-
sic for him as he walks away on the shady side, carrying his iron-
bound hat in his hand for a little ventilation.
Now, Jo’s improbable story concerning the lady and the sovereign
has awakened more or less the curiosity of all the company. Mr.
Guppy, who has an inquiring mind in matters of evidence and who
has been suffering severely from the lassitude of the long vacation,
takes that interest in the case that he enters on a regular cross-exami-
nation of the witness, which is found so interesting by the ladies that
Mrs. Snagsby politely invites him to step upstairs and drink a cup of
tea, if he will excuse the disarranged state of the tea-table, consequent
on their previous exertions. Mr. Guppy yielding his assent to this
proposal, Jo is requested to follow into the drawing-room doorway,
where Mr. Guppy takes him in hand as a witness, patting him into
this shape, that shape, and the other shape like a butterman dealing
with so much butter, and worrying him according to the best mod-
els. Nor is the examination unlike many such model displays, both
in respect of its eliciting nothing and of its being lengthy, for Mr.
Guppy is sensible of his talent, and Mrs. Snagsby feels not only that
it gratifies her inquisitive disposition, but that it lifts her husband’s
establishment higher up in the law. During the progress of this keen
encounter, the vessel Chadband, being merely engaged in the oil trade,
gets aground and waits to be floated off.
“Well!” says Mr. Guppy. “Either this boy sticks to it like
cobbler’s-wax or there is something out of the common here that
beats anything that ever came into my way at Kenge and Carboy’s.”
Mrs. Chadband whispers Mrs. Snagsby, who exclaims, “You don’t
say so!”
“For years!” replied Mrs. Chadband.
“Has known Kenge and Carboy’s office for years,” Mrs. Snagsby
triumphantly explains to Mr. Guppy. “Mrs. Chadband—this
gentleman’s wife—Reverend Mr. Chadband.”
“Oh, indeed!” says Mr. Guppy.
“Before I married my present husband,” says Mrs. Chadband.
“Was you a party in anything, ma’am?” says Mr. Guppy, transfer-
ring his cross-examination.
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“No.”
“Not a party in anything, ma’am?” says Mr. Guppy.
Mrs. Chadband shakes her head.
“Perhaps you were acquainted with somebody who was a party in
something, ma’am?” says Mr. Guppy, who likes nothing better than to
model his conversation on forensic principles.
“Not exactly that, either,” replies Mrs. Chadband, humouring the
joke with a hard-favoured smile.
“Not exactly that, either!” repeats Mr. Guppy. “Very good. Pray,
ma’am, was it a lady of your acquaintance who had some transac-
tions (we will not at present say what transactions) with Kenge and
Carboy’s office, or was it a gentleman of your acquaintance? Take
time, ma’am. We shall come to it presently. Man or woman, ma’am?”
“Neither,” says Mrs. Chadband as before.
“Oh! A child!” says Mr. Guppy, throwing on the admiring Mrs.
Snagsby the regular acute professional eye which is thrown on Brit-
ish jurymen. “Now, ma’am, perhaps you’ll have the kindness to tell
us what child.”
“You have got it at last, sir,” says Mrs. Chadband with another
hard-favoured smile. “Well, sir, it was before your time, most likely,
judging from your appearance. I was left in charge of a child named
Esther Summerson, who was put out in life by Messrs. Kenge and
Carboy.”
“Miss Summerson, ma’am!” cries Mr. Guppy, excited.
“I call her Esther Summerson,” says Mrs. Chadband with auster-
ity. “There was no Miss-ing of the girl in my time. It was Esther.
‘Esther, do this! Esther, do that!’ and she was made to do it.”
“My dear ma’am,” returns Mr. Guppy, moving across the small
apartment, “the humble individual who now addresses you received
that young lady in London when she first came here from the estab-
lishment to which you have alluded. Allow me to have the pleasure
of taking you by the hand.”
Mr. Chadband, at last seeing his opportunity, makes his accus-
tomed signal and rises with a smoking head, which he dabs with his
pocket-handkerchief. Mrs. Snagsby whispers “Hush!”
“My friends,” says Chadband, “we have partaken in moderation”
(which was certainly not the case so far as he was concerned) “of the
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comforts which have been provided for us. May this house live upon
the fatness of the land; may corn and wine be plentiful therein; may
it grow, may it thrive, may it prosper, may it advance, may it pro-
ceed, may it press forward! But, my friends, have we partaken of
any-hing else? We have. My friends, of what else have we partaken?
Of spiritual profit? Yes. From whence have we derived that spiritual
profit? My young friend, stand forth!”
Jo, thus apostrophized, gives a slouch backward, and another slouch
forward, and another slouch to each side, and confronts the eloquent
Chadband with evident doubts of his intentions.
“My young friend,” says Chadband, “you are to us a pearl, you are
to us a diamond, you are to us a gem, you are to us a jewel. And why,
my young friend?”
“I don’t know,” replies Jo. “I don’t know nothink.”
“My young friend,” says Chadband, “it is because you know noth-
ing that you are to us a gem and jewel. For what are you, my young
friend? Are you a beast of the field? No. A bird of the air? No. A fish
of the sea or river? No. You are a human boy, my young friend. A
human boy. O glorious to be a human boy! And why glorious, my
young friend? Because you are capable of receiving the lessons of
wisdom, because you are capable of profiting by this discourse which
I now deliver for your good, because you are not a stick, or a staff, or
a stock, or a stone, or a post, or a pillar.
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“My friends,” says Mr. Chadband with his persecuted chin folding
itself into its fat smile again as he looks round, “it is right that I should
be humbled, it is right that I should be tried, it is right that I should be
mortified, it is right that I should be corrected. I stumbled, on Sabbath
last, when I thought with pride of my three hours’ improving. The
account is now favourably balanced: my creditor has accepted a com-
position. O let us be joyful, joyful! O let us be joyful!”
Great sensation on the part of Mrs. Snagsby.
“My friends,” says Chadband, looking round him in conclusion,
“I will not proceed with my young friend now. Will you come to-
morrow, my young friend, and inquire of this good lady where I am
to be found to deliver a discourse unto you, and will you come like
the thirsty swallow upon the next day, and upon the day after that,
and upon the day after that, and upon many pleasant days, to hear
discourses?” (This with a cow-like lightness.)
Jo, whose immediate object seems to be to get away on any terms,
gives a shuffling nod. Mr. Guppy then throws him a penny, and
Mrs. Snagsby calls to Guster to see him safely out of the house. But
before he goes downstairs, Mr. Snagsby loads him with some broken
meats from the table, which he carries away, hugging in his arms.
So, Mr. Chadband—of whom the persecutors say that it is no
wonder he should go on for any length of time uttering such abomi-
nable nonsense, but that the wonder rather is that he should ever
leave off, having once the audacity to begin—retires into private life
until he invests a little capital of supper in the oil-trade. Jo moves on,
through the long vacation, down to Blackfriars Bridge, where he
finds a baking stony corner wherein to settle to his repast.
And there he sits, munching and gnawing, and looking up at the
great cross on the summit of St. Paul’s Cathedral, glittering above a
red-and-violet-tinted cloud of smoke. From the boy’s face one might
suppose that sacred emblem to be, in his eyes, the crowning confu-
sion of the great, confused city—so golden, so high up, so far out of
his reach. There he sits, the sun going down, the river running fast,
the crowd flowing by him in two streams—everything moving on
to some purpose and to one end—until he is stirred up and told to
“move on” too.
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CHAPTER XX
A New Lodger
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Dickens
fore, he shuts up one eye and shakes his head. On the strength of
these profound views, he in the most ingenious manner takes infi-
nite pains to counterplot when there is no plot, and plays the deepest
games of chess without any adversary.
It is a source of much gratification to Mr. Guppy, therefore, to find
the new-comer constantly poring over the papers in Jarndyce and
Jarndyce, for he well knows that nothing but confusion and failure can
come of that. His satisfaction communicates itself to a third saunterer
through the long vacation in Kenge and Carboy’s office, to wit, Young
Smallweed.
Whether Young Smallweed (metaphorically called Small and eke
Chick Weed, as it were jocularly to express a fledgling) was ever a boy
is much doubted in Lincoln’s Inn. He is now something under fif-
teen and an old limb of the law. He is facetiously understood to
entertain a passion for a lady at a cigar-shop in the neighbourhood of
Chancery Lane and for her sake to have broken off a contract with
another lady, to whom he had been engaged some years. He is a
town-made article, of small stature and weazen features, but may be
perceived from a considerable distance by means of his very tall hat.
To become a Guppy is the object of his ambition. He dresses at that
gentleman (by whom he is patronized), talks at him, walks at him,
founds himself entirely on him. He is honoured with Mr. Guppy’s
particular confidence and occasionally advises him, from the deep
wells of his experience, on difficult points in private life.
Mr. Guppy has been lolling out of window all the morning after
trying all the stools in succession and finding none of them easy, and
after several times putting his head into the iron safe with a notion of
cooling it. Mr. Smallweed has been twice dispatched for effervescent
drinks, and has twice mixed them in the two official tumblers and
stirred them up with the ruler. Mr. Guppy propounds for Mr.
Smallweed’s consideration the paradox that the more you drink the
thirstier you are and reclines his head upon the window-sill in a state
of hopeless languor.
While thus looking out into the shade of Old Square, Lincoln’s
Inn, surveying the intolerable bricks and mortar, Mr. Guppy becomes
conscious of a manly whisker emerging from the cloistered walk
below and turning itself up in the direction of his face. At the same
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time, a low whistle is wafted through the Inn and a suppressed voice
cries, “Hip! Gup-py!”
“Why, you don’t mean it!” says Mr. Guppy, aroused. “Small! Here’s
Jobling!” Small’s head looks out of window too and nods to Jobling.
“Where have you sprung up from?” inquires Mr. Guppy.
“From the market-gardens down by Deptford. I can’t stand it any
longer. I must enlist. I say! I wish you’d lend me half a crown. Upon
my soul, I’m hungry.”
Jobling looks hungry and also has the appearance of having run to
seed in the market-gardens down by Deptford.
“I say! Just throw out half a crown if you have got one to spare. I
want to get some dinner.”
“Will you come and dine with me?” says Mr. Guppy, throwing
out the coin, which Mr. Jobling catches neatly.
“How long should I have to hold out?” says Jobling.
“Not half an hour. I am only waiting here till the enemy goes,
returns Mr. Guppy, butting inward with his head.
“What enemy?”
“A new one. Going to be articled. Will you wait?”
“Can you give a fellow anything to read in the meantime?” says
Mr Jobling.
Smallweed suggests the law list. But Mr. Jobling declares with
much earnestness that he “can’t stand it.”
“You shall have the paper,” says Mr. Guppy. “He shall bring it
down. But you had better not be seen about here. Sit on our staircase
and read. It’s a quiet place.”
Jobling nods intelligence and acquiescence. The sagacious
Smallweed supplies him with the newspaper and occasionally
drops his eye upon him from the landing as a precaution against
his becoming disgusted with waiting and making an untimely
departure. At last the enemy retreats, and then Smallweed fetches
Mr. Jobling up.
“Well, and how are you?” says Mr. Guppy, shaking hands with
him.
“So, so. How are you?”
Mr. Guppy replying that he is not much to boast of, Mr. Jobling
ventures on the question, “How is she?” This Mr. Guppy resents as a
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experience, Mr. Guppy consults him in the choice of that day’s ban-
quet, turning an appealing look towards him as the waitress repeats
the catalogue of viands and saying “What do you take, Chick?” Chick,
out of the profundity of his artfulness, preferring “veal and ham and
French beans—and don’t you forget the stuffing, Polly” (with an
unearthly cock of his venerable eye), Mr. Guppy and Mr. Jobling
give the like order. Three pint pots of half-and-half are superadded.
Quickly the waitress returns bearing what is apparently a model of
the Tower of Babel but what is really a pile of plates and flat tin dish-
covers. Mr. Smallweed, approving of what is set before him, conveys
intelligent benignity into his ancient eye and winks upon her. Then,
amid a constant coming in, and going out, and running about, and a
clatter of crockery, and a rumbling up and down of the machine
which brings the nice cuts from the kitchen, and a shrill crying for
more nice cuts down the speaking-pipe, and a shrill reckoning of the
cost of nice cuts that have been disposed of, and a general flush and
steam of hot joints, cut and uncut, and a considerably heated atmo-
sphere in which the soiled knives and tablecloths seem to break out
spontaneously into eruptions of grease and blotches of beer, the legal
triumvirate appease their appetites.
Mr. Jobling is buttoned up closer than mere adornment might re-
quire. His hat presents at the rims a peculiar appearance of a glistening
nature, as if it had been a favourite snail-promenade. The same phenom-
enon is visible on some parts of his coat, and particularly at the seams.
He has the faded appearance of a gentleman in embarrassed circum-
stances; even his light whiskers droop with something of a shabby air.
His appetite is so vigorous that it suggests spare living for some
little time back. He makes such a speedy end of his plate of veal and
ham, bringing it to a close while his companions are yet midway in
theirs, that Mr. Guppy proposes another. “Thank you, Guppy,” says
Mr. Jobling, “I really don’t know but what I will take another.”
Another being brought, he falls to with great goodwill.
Mr. Guppy takes silent notice of him at intervals until he is half
way through this second plate and stops to take an enjoying pull at
his pint pot of half-and-half (also renewed) and stretches out his legs
and rubs his hands. Beholding him in which glow of contentment,
Mr. Guppy says, “You are a man again, Tony!”
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Dickens
“Well, not quite yet,” says Mr. Jobling. “Say, just born.”
“Will you take any other vegetables? Grass? Peas? Summer
cabbage?”
“Thank you, Guppy,” says Mr. Jobling. “I really don’t know but
what I will take summer cabbage.”
Order given; with the sarcastic addition (from Mr. Smallweed) of
“Without slugs, Polly!” And cabbage produced.
“I am growing up, Guppy,” says Mr. Jobling, plying his knife and
fork with a relishing steadiness.
“Glad to hear it.”
“In fact, I have just turned into my teens,” says Mr. Jobling.
He says no more until he has performed his task, which he achieves
as Messrs. Guppy and Smallweed finish theirs, thus getting over the
ground in excellent style and beating those two gentlemen easily by a
veal and ham and a cabbage.
“Now, Small,” says Mr. Guppy, “what would you recommend
about pastry?”
“Marrow puddings,” says Mr. Smallweed instantly.
“Aye, aye!” cries Mr. Jobling with an arch look. “You’re there, are
you? Thank you, Mr. Guppy, I don’t know but what I will take a
marrow pudding.”
Three marrow puddings being produced, Mr. Jobling adds in a
pleasant humour that he is coming of age fast. To these succeed, by
command of Mr. Smallweed, “three Cheshires,” and to those “three
small rums.” This apex of the entertainment happily reached, Mr.
Jobling puts up his legs on the carpeted seat (having his own side of
the box to himself ), leans against the wall, and says, “I am grown up
now, Guppy. I have arrived at maturity.”
“What do you think, now,” says Mr. Guppy, “about—you don’t
mind Smallweed?”
“Not the least in the worid. I have the pleasure of drinking his
good health.”
“Sir, to you!” says Mr. Smallweed.
“I was saying, what do you think now,” pursues Mr. Guppy, “of
enlisting?”
“Why, what I may think after dinner,” returns Mr. Jobling, “is
one thing, my dear Guppy, and what I may think before dinner is
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another thing. Still, even after dinner, I ask myself the question,
What am I to do? How am I to live? Ill fo manger, you know,” says
Mr. Jobling, pronouncing that word as if he meant a necessary
fixture in an English stable. “Ill fo manger. That’s the French say-
ing, and mangering is as necessary to me as it is to a Frenchman. Or
more so.”
Mr. Smallweed is decidedly of opinion “much more so.”
“If any man had told me,” pursues Jobling, “even so lately as when
you and I had the frisk down in Lincolnshire, Guppy, and drove over
to see that house at Castle Wold—”
Mr. Smallweed corrects him—Chesney Wold.
“Chesney Wold. (I thank my honourable friend for that cheer.)
If any man had told me then that I should be as hard up at the
present time as I literally find myself, I should have—well, I
should have pitched into him,” says Mr. Jobling, taking a little
rum-and-water with an air of desperate resignation; “I should
have let fly at his head.”
“Still, Tony, you were on the wrong side of the post then,”
remonstrates Mr. Guppy. “You were talking about nothing else in
the gig.”
“Guppy,” says Mr. Jobling, “I will not deny it. I was on the wrong
side of the post. But I trusted to things coming round.”
That very popular trust in flat things coming round! Not in their
being beaten round, or worked round, but in their “coming” round!
As though a lunatic should trust in the world’s “coming” triangular!
“I had confident expectations that things would come round and
be all square,” says Mr. Jobling with some vagueness of expression
and perhaps of meaning too. “But I was disappointed. They never
did. And when it came to creditors making rows at the office and to
people that the office dealt with making complaints about dirty trifles
of borrowed money, why there was an end of that connexion. And
of any new professional connexion too, for if I was to give a reference
to-morrow, it would be mentioned and would sew me up. Then
what’s a fellow to do? I have been keeping out of the way and living
cheap down about the market-gardens, but what’s the use of living
cheap when you have got no money? You might as well live dear.”
“Better,” Mr. Smallweed thinks.
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“Certainly. It’s the fashionable way; and fashion and whiskers have
been my weaknesses, and I don’t care who knows it,” says Mr. Jobling.
“They are great weaknesses—Damme, sir, they are great. Well,” proceeds
Mr. Jobling after a defiant visit to his rum-and-water, “what can a fellow
do, I ask you, but enlist?”
Mr. Guppy comes more fully into the conversation to state what,
in his opinion, a fellow can do. His manner is the gravely impressive
manner of a man who has not committed himself in life otherwise
than as he has become the victim of a tender sorrow of the heart.
“Jobling,” says Mr. Guppy, “myself and our mutual friend
Smallweed—”
Mr. Smallweed modestly observes, “Gentlemen both!” and drinks.
“—Have had a little conversation on this matter more than once
since you—”
“Say, got the sack!” cries Mr. Jobling bitterly. “Say it, Guppy. You
mean it.”
“No-o-o! Left the Inn,” Mr. Smallweed delicately suggests.
“Since you left the Inn, Jobling,” says Mr. Guppy; “and I have men-
tioned to our mutual friend Smallweed a plan I have lately thought of
proposing. You know Snagsby the stationer?”
“I know there is such a stationer,” returns Mr. Jobling. “He was
not ours, and I am not acquainted with him.”
“He is ours, Jobling, and I am acquainted with him,” Mr. Guppy
retorts. “Well, sir! I have lately become better acquainted with him through
some accidental circumstances that have made me a visitor of his in
private life. Those circumstances it is not necessary to offer in argument.
They may—or they may not—have some reference to a subject which
may—or may not—have cast its shadow on my existence.”
As it is Mr. Guppy’s perplexing way with boastful misery to tempt
his particular friends into this subject, and the moment they touch it,
to turn on them with that trenchant severity about the chords in the
human mind, both Mr. Jobling and Mr. Smallweed decline the pitfall
by remaining silent.
“Such things may be,” repeats Mr. Guppy, “or they may not be.
They are no part of the case. It is enough to mention that both Mr.
and Mrs. Snagsby are very willing to oblige me and that Snagsby has,
in busy times, a good deal of copying work to give out. He has all
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“No,” says Mr. Jobling, “I don’t mind it; but he might as well have
died somewhere else. It’s devilish odd that he need go and die at my
place!” Mr. Jobling quite resents this liberty, several times returning to
it with such remarks as, “There are places enough to die in, I should
think!” or, “He wouldn’t have liked my dying at his place, I dare say!”
However, the compact being virtually made, Mr. Guppy proposes
to dispatch the trusty Smallweed to ascertain if Mr. Krook is at home,
as in that case they may complete the negotiation without delay. Mr.
Jobling approving, Smallweed puts himself under the tall hat and
conveys it out of the dining-rooms in the Guppy manner. He soon
returns with the intelligence that Mr. Krook is at home and that he
has seen him through the shop-door, sitting in the back premises,
sleeping “like one o’clock.”
“Then I’ll pay,” says Mr. Guppy, “and we’ll go and see him. Small,
what will it be?”
Mr. Smallweed, compelling the attendance of the waitress with
one hitch of his eyelash, instantly replies as follows: “Four veals and
hams is three, and four potatoes is three and four, and one summer
cabbage is three and six, and three marrows is four and six, and six
breads is five, and three Cheshires is five and three, and four half-
pints of half-and-half is six and three, and four small rums is eight
and three, and three Pollys is eight and six. Eight and six in half a
sovereign, Polly, and eighteenpence out!”
Not at all excited by these stupendous calculations, Smallweed
dismisses his friends with a cool nod and remains behind to take a
little admiring notice of Polly, as opportunity may serve, and to read
the daily papers, which are so very large in proportion to himself,
shorn of his hat, that when he holds up the Times to run his eye over
the columns, he seems to have retired for the night and to have dis-
appeared under the bedclothes.
Mr. Guppy and Mr. Jobling repair to the rag and bottle shop,
where they find Krook still sleeping like one o’clock, that is to say,
breathing stertorously with his chin upon his breast and quite insen-
sible to any external sounds or even to gentle shaking. On the table
beside him, among the usual lumber, stand an empty gin-bottle and
a glass. The unwholesome air is so stained with this liquor that even
the green eyes of the cat upon her shelf, as they open and shut and
glimmer on the visitors, look drunk.
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“Hold up here!” says Mr. Guppy, giving the relaxed figure of the
old man another shake. “Mr. Krook! Halloa, sir!”
But it would seem as easy to wake a bundle of old clothes with a spiritu-
ous heat smouldering in it. “Did you ever see such a stupor as he falls into,
between drink and sleep?” says Mr. Guppy.
“If this is his regular sleep,” returns Jobling, rather alarmed,
“it’ll last a long time one of these days, I am thinking.”
“It’s always more like a fit than a nap,” says Mr. Guppy, shaking
him again. “Halloa, your lordship! Why, he might be robbed fifty
times over! Open your eyes!”
After much ado, he opens them, but without appearing to see his
visitors or any other objects. Though he crosses one leg on another,
and folds his hands, and several times closes and opens his parched
lips, he seems to all intents and purposes as insensible as before.
“He is alive, at any rate,” says Mr. Guppy. “How are you, my Lord
Chancellor. I have brought a friend of mine, sir, on a little matter of
business.”
The old man still sits, often smacking his dry lips without the least
consciousness. After some minutes he makes an attempt to rise. They
help him up, and he staggers against the wall and stares at them.
“How do you do, Mr. Krook?” says Mr. Guppy in some discom-
fiture. “How do you do, sir? You are looking charming, Mr. Krook.
I hope you are pretty well?”
The old man, in aiming a purposeless blow at Mr. Guppy, or at
nothing, feebly swings himself round and comes with his face against
the wall. So he remains for a minute or two, heaped up against it,
and then staggers down the shop to the front door. The air, the move-
ment in the court, the lapse of time, or the combination of these
things recovers him. He comes back pretty steadily, adjusting his fur
cap on his head and looking keenly at them.
“Your servant, gentlemen; I’ve been dozing. Hi! I am hard to wake,
odd times.”
“Rather so, indeed, sir,” responds Mr. Guppy.
“What? You’ve been a-trying to do it, have you?” says the
suspicious Krook.
“Only a little,” Mr. Guppy explains.
The old man’s eye resting on the empty bottle, he takes it up,
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important) the vote and interest of Mrs. Snagsby are secured. They
then report progress to the eminent Smallweed, waiting at the office
in his tall hat for that purpose, and separate, Mr. Guppy explaining
that he would terminate his little entertainment by standing treat at
the play but that there are chords in the human mind which would
render it a hollow mockery.
On the morrow, in the dusk of evening, Mr. Weevle modestly ap-
pears at Krook’s, by no means incommoded with luggage, and estab-
lishes himself in his new lodging, where the two eyes in the shutters
stare at him in his sleep, as if they were full of wonder. On the follow-
ing day Mr. Weevle, who is a handy good-for-nothing kind of young
fellow, borrows a needle and thread of Miss Flite and a hammer of his
landlord and goes to work devising apologies for window-curtains,
and knocking up apologies for shelves, and hanging up his two tea-
cups, milkpot, and crockery sundries on a pennyworth of little hooks,
like a shipwrecked sailor making the best of it.
But what Mr. Weevle prizes most of all his few possessions (next
after his light whiskers, for which he has an attachment that only
whiskers can awaken in the breast of man) is a choice collection of
copper-plate impressions from that truly national work The Divini-
ties of Albion, or Galaxy Gallery of British Beauty, representing la-
dies of title and fashion in every variety of smirk that art, combined
with capital, is capable of producing. With these magnificent por-
traits, unworthily confined in a band-box during his seclusion among
the market-gardens, he decorates his apartment; and as the Galaxy
Gallery of British Beauty wears every variety of fancy dress, plays
every variety of musical instrument, fondles every variety of dog,
ogles every variety of prospect, and is backed up by every variety of
flower-pot and balustrade, the result is very imposing.
But fashion is Mr. Weevle’s, as it was Tony Jobling’s, weakness. To
borrow yesterday’s paper from the Sol’s Arms of an evening and read
about the brilliant and distinguished meteors that are shooting across
the fashionable sky in every direction is unspeakable consolation to
him. To know what member of what brilliant and distinguished
circle accomplished the brilliant and distinguished feat of joining it
yesterday or contemplates the no less brilliant and distinguished feat
of leaving it to-morrow gives him a thrill of joy. To be informed
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CHAPTER XXI
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annuated Mr. and Mrs. Smallweed while away the rosy hours. On
the stove are a couple of trivets for the pots and kettles which it is
Grandfather Smallweed’s usual occupation to watch, and projecting
from the chimney-piece between them is a sort of brass gallows for
roasting, which he also superintends when it is in action. Under the
venerable Mr. Smallweed’s seat and guarded by his spindle legs is a
drawer in his chair, reported to contain property to a fabulous amount.
Beside him is a spare cushion with which he is always provided in
order that he may have something to throw at the venerable partner
of his respected age whenever she makes an allusion to money—a
subject on which he is particularly sensitive.
“And where’s Bart?” Grandfather Smallweed inquires of Judy, Bart’s
twin sister.
“He an’t come in yet,” says Judy.
“It’s his tea-time, isn’t it?”
“No.”
“How much do you mean to say it wants then?”
“Ten minutes.”
“Hey?”
“Ten minutes.” (Loud on the part of Judy.)
“Ho!” says Grandfather Smallweed. “Ten minutes.”
Grandmother Smallweed, who has been mumbling and shaking
her head at the trivets, hearing figures mentioned, connects them
with money and screeches like a horrible old parrot without any
plumage, “Ten ten-pound notes!”
Grandfather Smallweed immediately throws the cushion at her.
“Drat you, be quiet!” says the good old man.
The effect of this act of jaculation is twofold. It not only
doubles up Mrs. Smallweed’s head against the side of her porter’s
chair and causes her to present, when extricated by her granddaugh-
ter, a highly unbecoming state of cap, but the necessary exertion re-
coils on Mr. Smallweed himself, whom it throws back into his porter’s
chair like a broken puppet. The excellent old gentleman being at
these times a mere clothes-bag with a black skull-cap on the top of it,
does not present a very animated appearance until he has undergone
the two operations at the hands of his granddaughter of being shaken
up like a great bottle and poked and punched like a great bolster.
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It’s rare for you both that you went out early in life—Judy to the
flower business, and you to the law. You won’t want to spend it. You’ll
get your living without it, and put more to it. When I am gone, Judy
will go back to the flower business and you’ll still stick to the law.”
One might infer from Judy’s appearance that her business rather lay
with the thorns than the flowers, but she has in her time been appren-
ticed to the art and mystery of artificial flower-making. A close ob-
server might perhaps detect both in her eye and her brother’s, when
their venerable grandsire anticipates his being gone, some little impa-
tience to know when he may be going, and some resentful opinion
that it is time he went.
“Now, if everybody has done,” says Judy, completing her
preparations, “I’ll have that girl in to her tea. She would ever
leave off if she took it by herself in the kitchen.”
Charley is accordingly introduced, and under a heavy fire of eyes,
sits down to her basin and a Druidical ruin of bread and butter. In
the active superintendence of this young person, Judy Smallweed
appears to attain a perfectly geological age and to date from the re-
motest periods. Her systematic manner of flying at her and pounc-
ing on her, with or without pretence, whether or no, is wonderful,
evincing an accomplishment in the art of girl-driving seldom reached
by the oldest practitioners.
“Now, don’t stare about you all the afternoon,” cries Judy, shaking
her head and stamping her foot as she happens to catch the glance
which has been previously sounding the basin of tea, “but take your
victuals and get back to your work.”
“Yes, miss,” says Charley.
“Don’t say yes,” returns Miss Smallweed, “for I know what you girls
are. Do it without saying it, and then I may begin to believe you.”
Charley swallows a great gulp of tea in token of submission and so
disperses the Druidical ruins that Miss Smallweed charges her not to
gormandize, which “in you girls,” she observes, is disgusting. Char-
ley might find some more difficulty in meeting her views on the
general subject of girls but for a knock at the door.
“See who it is, and don’t chew when you open it!” cries Judy.
The object of her attentions withdrawing for the purpose, Miss
Smallweed takes that opportunity of jumbling the remainder of the
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bread and butter together and launching two or three dirty tea-cups
into the ebb-tide of the basin of tea as a hint that she considers the
eating and drinking terminated.
“Now! Who is it, and what’s wanted?” says the snappish Judy.
It is one Mr. George, it appears. Without other announcement or
ceremony, Mr. George walks in.
“Whew!” says Mr. George. “You are hot here. Always a fire, eh?
Well! Perhaps you do right to get used to one.” Mr. George makes
the latter remark to himself as he nods to Grandfather Smallweed.
“Ho! It’s you!” cries the old gentleman. “How de do? How de do?”
“Middling,” replies Mr. George, taking a chair. “Your granddaugh-
ter I have had the honour of seeing before; my service to you, miss.”
“This is my grandson,” says Grandfather Smallweed. “You ha’n’t
seen him before. He is in the law and not much at home.”
“My service to him, too! He is like his sister. He is very like his
sister. He is devilish like his sister,” says Mr. George,
laying a great and not altogether complimentary stress on his last
adjective.
“And how does the world use you, Mr. George?” Grandfather
Smallweed inquires, slowly rubbing his legs.
“Pretty much as usual. Like a football.”
He is a swarthy brown man of fifty, well made, and good looking,
with crisp dark hair, bright eyes, and a broad chest. His sinewy and pow-
erful hands, as sunburnt as his face, have evidently been used to a pretty
rough life. What is curious about him is that he sits forward on his chair
as if he were, from long habit, allowing space for some dress or accoutre-
ments that he has altogether laid aside. His step too is measured and
heavy and would go well with a weighty clash and jingle of spurs. He is
close-shaved now, but his mouth is set as if his upper lip had been for
years familiar with a great moustache; and his manner of occasionally
laying the open palm of his broad brown hand upon it is to the same
effect. Altogether one might guess Mr. George to have been a trooper
once upon a time.
A special contrast Mr. George makes to the Smallweed family.
Trooper was never yet billeted upon a household more unlike him. It
is a broadsword to an oyster-knife. His developed figure and their
stunted forms, his large manner filling any amount of room and their
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little narrow pinched ways, his sounding voice and their sharp spare
tones, are in the strongest and the strangest opposition. As he sits in the
middle of the grim parlour, leaning a little forward, with his hands
upon his thighs and his elbows squared, he looks as though, if he
remained there long, he would absorb into himself the whole family
and the whole four-roomed house, extra little back-kitchen and all.
“Do you rub your legs to rub life into ‘em?” he asks of Grandfa-
ther Smallweed after looking round the room.
“Why, it’s partly a habit, Mr. George, and—yes—it partly helps
the circulation,” he replies.
“The cir-cu-la-tion!” repeats Mr. George, folding his arms upon
his chest and seeming to become two sizes larger. “Not much of that,
I should think.”
“Truly I’m old, Mr. George,” says Grandfather Smallweed. “But I
can carry my years. I’m older than her,” nodding at his wife, “and see
what she is? You’re a brimstone chatterer!” with a sudden revival of
his late hostility.
“Unlucky old soul!” says Mr. George, turning his head in that di-
rection. “Don’t scold the old lady. Look at her here, with her poor
cap half off her head and her poor hair all in a muddle. Hold up,
ma’am. That’s better. There we are! Think of your mother, Mr.
Smallweed,” says Mr. George, coming back to his seat from assisting
her, “if your wife an’t enough.”
“I suppose you were an excellent son, Mr. George?” the old man
hints with a leer.
The colour of Mr. George’s face rather deepens as he replies, “Why
no. I wasn’t.”
“I am astonished at it.”
“So am I. I ought to have hands to Mr. George, who twists
it up for a pipelight. As the old man inspects, through his glasses, every
up-stroke and down-stroke of both documents before he releases them
from their leathern prison, and as he counts the money three times
over and requires Judy to say every word she utters at least twice, and is
as tremulously slow of speech and action as it is possible to be, this
business is a long time in progress. When it is quite concluded, and not
before, he disengages his ravenous eyes and fingers from it and answers
Mr. George’s last remark by saying, “Afraid to order the pipe? We are
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not so mercenary as that, sir. Judy, see directly to the pipe and the glass
of cold brandy-and-water for Mr. George.”
The sportive twins, who have been looking straight before them
all this time except when they have been engrossed by the black leathern
cases, retire together, generally disdainful of the visitor, but leaving
him to the old man as two young cubs might leave a traveller to the
parental bear.
“And there you sit, I suppose, all the day long, eh?” says Mr. George
with folded arms.
“Just so, just so,” the old man nods.
“And don’t you occupy yourself at all?”
“I watch the fire—and the boiling and the roasting—”
“When there is any,” says Mr. George with great expression.
“Just so. When there is any.”
“Don’t you read or get read to?”
The old man shakes his head with sharp sly triumph. “No, no. We
have never been readers in our family. It don’t pay. Stuff. Idleness.
Folly. No, no!”
“There’s not much to choose between your two states,” says the
visitor in a key too low for the old man’s dull hearing as he looks from
him to the old woman and back again. “I say!” in a louder voice.
“I hear you.”
“You’ll sell me up at last, I suppose, when I am a day in arrear.”
“My dear friend!” cries Grandfather Smallweed, stretching out both
hands to embrace him. “Never! Never, my dear friend! But my friend
in the city that I got to lend you the money—he might!”
“Oh! You can’t answer for him?” says Mr. George, finishing the
inquiry in his lower key with the words “You lying old rascal!”
“My dear friend, he is not to be depended on. I wouldn’t trust
him. He will have his bond, my dear friend.”
“Devil doubt him,” says Mr. George. Charley appearing with a
tray, on which are the pipe, a small paper of tobacco, and the brandy-
and-water, he asks her, “How do you come here! You haven’t got the
family face.”
“I goes out to work, sir,” returns Charley.
The trooper (if trooper he be or have been) takes her bonnet off,
with a light touch for so strong a hand, and pats her on the head.
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elbow on his right knee and his pipe supported in that hand, while
his other hand, resting on his left leg, squares his left elbow in a
martial manner, continues to smoke. Meanwhile he looks at Mr.
Smallweed with grave attention and now and then fans the cloud of
smoke away in order that he may see him the more clearly.
“I take it,” he says, making just as much and as little change in his
position as will enable him to reach the glass to his lips with a round,
full action, “that I am the only man alive (or dead either) that gets the
value of a pipe out of you?”
“Well,” returns the old man, “it’s true that I don’t see company,
Mr. George, and that I don’t treat. I can’t afford to it. But as you, in
your pleasant way, made your pipe a condition—”
“Why, it’s not for the value of it; that’s no great thing. It was a
fancy to get it out of you. To have something in for my money.”
“Ha! You’re prudent, prudent, sir!” cries Grandfather Smallweed,
rubbing his legs.
“Very. I always was.” Puff. “It’s a sure sign of my prudence
that I ever found the way here.” Puff. “Also, that I am what I am.”
Puff. “I am well known to be prudent,” says Mr. George, compos-
edly smoking. “I rose in life that way.”
“Don’t he down-hearted, sir. You may rise yet.”
Mr. George laughs and drinks.
“Ha’n’t you no relations, now,” asks Grandfather Smallweed with
a twinkle in his eyes, “who would pay off this little principal or who
would lend you a good name or two that I could persuade my friend
in the city to make you a further advance upon? Two good names
would be sufficient for my friend in the city. Ha’n’t you no such
relations, Mr. George?”
Mr. George, still composedly smoking, replies, “If I had, I
shouldn’t trouble them. I have been trouble enough to my belongings
in my day. It may be a very good sort of penitence in a vagabond, who
has wasted the best time of his life, to go back then to decent people
that he never was a credit to and live upon them, but it’s not my sort.
The best kind of amends then for having gone away is to keep away, in
my opinion.”
“But natural affection, Mr. George,” hints Grandfather Smallweed.
“For two good names, hey?” says Mr. George, shaking his head and still
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“Well!” says Mr. George, smoking on. “It wouldn’t have been much
to his advantage to have been clapped into prison by the whole bill
and judgment trade of London.”
“How do you know that? Some of his rich relations might have
paid his debts or compounded for ‘em. Besides, he had taken us in.
He owed us immense sums all round. I would sooner have strangled
him than had no return. If I sit here thinking of him,” snarls the old
man, holding up his impotent ten fingers, “I want to strangle him
now.” And in a sudden access of fury, he throws the cushion at the
unoffending Mrs. Smallweed, but it passes harmlessly on one side of
her chair.
“I don’t need to be told,” returns the trooper, taking his pipe from
his lips for a moment and carrying his eyes back from following the
progress of the cushion to the pipe-bowl which is burning low, “that
he carried on heavily and went to ruin. I have been at his right hand
many a day when he was charging upon ruin full-gallop. I was with
him when he was sick and well, rich and poor. I laid this hand upon
him after he had run through everything and broken down every-
thing beneath him—when he held a pistol to his head.”
“I wish he had let it off,” says the benevolent old man, “and blown
his head into as many pieces as he owed pounds!”
“That would have been a smash indeed,” returns the trooper coolly;
“any way, he had been young, hopeful, and handsome in the days
gone by, and I am glad I never found him, when he was neither, to
lead to a result so much to his advantage. That’s reason number one.”
“I hope number two’s as good?” snarls the old man.
“Why, no. It’s more of a selfish reason. If I had found him, I must
have gone to the other world to look. He was there.”
“How do you know he was there?”
“He wasn’t here.”
“How do you know he wasn’t here?”
“Don’t lose your temper as well as your money,” says Mr. George,
calmly knocking the ashes out of his pipe. “He was drowned long
before. I am convinced of it. He went over a ship’s side. Whether
intentionally or accidentally, I don’t know. Perhaps your friend in the
city does. Do you know what that tune is, Mr. Smallweed?” he adds
after breaking off to whistle one, accompanied on the table with the
empty pipe.
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“Tune!” replied the old man. “No. We never have tunes here.”
“That’s the Dead March in Saul. They bury soldiers to it, so it’s
the natural end of the subject. Now, if your pretty granddaughter—
excuse me, miss—will condescend to take care of this pipe for two
months, we shall save the cost of one next time. Good evening, Mr.
Smallweed!”
“My dear friend!” the old man gives him both his hands.
“So you think your friend in the city will be hard upon me if I fall in
a payment?” says the trooper, looking down upon him like a giant.
“My dear friend, I am afraid he will,” returns the old man, looking
up at him like a pygmy.
Mr. George laughs, and with a glance at Mr. Smallweed and a
parting salutation to the scornful Judy, strides out of the parlour,
clashing imaginary sabres and other metallic appurtenances as he goes.
“You’re a damned rogue,” says the old gentleman, making a hid-
eous grimace at the door as he shuts it. “But I’ll lime you, you dog,
I’ll lime you!”
After this amiable remark, his spirit soars into those enchanting
regions of reflection which its education and pursuits have opened to
it, and again he and Mrs. Smallweed while away the rosy hours, two
unrelieved sentinels forgotten as aforesaid by the Black Serjeant.
While the twain are faithful to their post, Mr. George strides
through the streets with a massive kind of swagger and a grave-
enough face. It is eight o’clock now, and the day is fast drawing in.
He stops hard by Waterloo Bridge and reads a playbill, decides to
go to Astley’s Theatre. Being there, is much delighted with the
horses and the feats of strength; looks at the weapons with a critical
eye; disapproves of the combats as giving evidences of unskilful
swordsmanship; but is touched home by the sentiments. In the last
scene, when the Emperor of Tartary gets up into a cart and conde-
scends to bless the united lovers by hovering over them with the
Union Jack, his eyelashes are moistened with emotion.
The theatre over, Mr. George comes across the water again and makes
his way to that curious region lying about the Haymarket and Leicester
Square which is a centre of attraction to indifferent foreign hotels and
indifferent foreigners, racket-courts, fighting-men, swordsmen,
footguards, old china, gaming-houses, exhibitions, and a large medley of
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of instead of going straight to them, which has left a smear all round
the four walls, conventionally called “Phil’s mark.”
This custodian of George’s Gallery in George’s absence concludes
his proceedings, when he has locked the great doors and turned out
all the lights but one, which he leaves to glimmer, by dragging out
from a wooden cabin in a corner two mattresses and bedding. These
being drawn to opposite ends of the gallery, the trooper makes his
own bed and Phil makes his.
“Phil!” says the master, walking towards him without his coat and
waistcoat, and looking more soldierly than ever in his braces. “You
were found in a doorway, weren’t you?”
“Gutter,” says Phil. “Watchman tumbled over me.”
“Then vagabondizing came natural to you from the beginning.”
“As nat’ral as possible,” says Phil.
“Good night!”
“Good night, guv’ner.”
Phil cannot even go straight to bed, but finds it necessary to shoul-
der round two sides of the gallery and then tack off at his mattress.
The trooper, after taking a turn or two in the rifle-distance and look-
ing up at the moon now shining through the skylights, strides to his
own mattress by a shorter route and goes to bed too.
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CHAPTER XXII
Mr. Bucket
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tention to your wife. That was prudent I think, because it’s not a
matter of such importance that it requires to be mentioned.”
“Well, sir,” returns Mr. Snagsby, “you see, my little woman is—
not to put too fine a point upon it—inquisitive. She’s inquisitive.
Poor little thing, she’s liable to spasms, and it’s good for her to have
her mind employed. In consequence of which she employs it—I
should say upon every individual thing she can lay hold of, whether
it concerns her or not—especially not. My little woman has a very
active mind, sir.”
Mr. Snagsby drinks and murmurs with an admiring cough behind
his hand, “Dear me, very fine wine indeed!”
“Therefore you kept your visit to yourself last night?” says Mr.
Tulkinghorn. “And to-night too?”
“Yes, sir, and to-night, too. My little woman is at present in—not
to put too fine a point on it—in a pious state, or in what she consid-
ers such, and attends the Evening Exertions (which is the name they
go by) of a reverend party of the name of Chadband. He has a great
deal of eloquence at his command, undoubtedly, but I am not quite
favourable to his style myself. That’s neither here nor there. My little
woman being engaged in that way made it easier for me to step round
in a quiet manner.”
Mr. Tulkinghorn assents. “Fill your glass, Snagsby.”
“Thank you, sir, I am sure,” returns the stationer with his cough of
deference. “This is wonderfully fine wine, sir!”
“It is a rare wine now,” says Mr. Tulkinghorn. “It is fifty years old.”
“Is it indeed, sir? But I am not surprised to hear it, I am sure. It
might be—any age almost.” After rendering this general tribute to the
port, Mr. Snagsby in his modesty coughs an apology behind his hand
for drinking anything so precious.
“Will you run over, once again, what the boy said?” asks Mr.
Tulkinghorn, putting his hands into the pockets of his rusty
smallclothes and leaning quietly back in his chair.
“With pleasure, sir.”
Then, with fidelity, though with some prolixity, the law-stationer re-
peats Jo’s statement made to the assembled guests at his house. On com-
ing to the end of his narrative, he gives a great start and breaks off with,
“Dear me, sir, I wasn’t aware there was any other gentleman present!”
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him. I promise you, as a man, that you shall see the boy sent away all
right. Don’t you be afraid of hurting him; you an’t going to do that.”
“Very well, Mr. Tulkinghorn!” cries Mr. Snagsby cheerfully. And
reassured, “Since that’s the case—”
“Yes! And lookee here, Mr. Snagsby,” resumes Bucket, taking him
aside by the arm, tapping him familiarly on the breast, and speaking
in a confidential tone. “You’re a man of the world, you know, and a
man of business, and a man of sense. That’s what you are.”
“I am sure I am much obliged to you for your good opinion,” returns
the stationer with his cough of modesty, “but—”
“That’s what you are, you know,” says Bucket. “Now, it an’t neces-
sary to say to a man like you, engaged in your business, which is a
business of trust and requires a person to be wide awake and have his
senses about him and his head screwed on tight (I had an uncle in
your business once)—it an’t necessary to say to a man like you that
it’s the best and wisest way to keep little matters like this quiet. Don’t
you see? Quiet!”
“Certainly, certainly,” returns the other.
“I don’t mind telling you,” says Bucket with an engaging appearance of
frankness, “that as far as I can understand it, there seems to be a doubt
whether this dead person wasn’t entitled to a little property, and whether
this female hasn’t been up to some games respecting that property, don’t
you see?”
“Oh!” says Mr. Snagsby, but not appearing to see quite distinctly.
“Now, what you want,” pursues Bucket, again tapping Mr. Snagsby
on the breast in a comfortable and soothing manner, “is that every per-
son should have their rights according to justice. That’s what you want.”
“To be sure,” returns Mr. Snagsby with a nod.
“On account of which, and at the same time to oblige a—do you
call it, in your business, customer or client? I forget how my uncle
used to call it.”
“Why, I generally say customer myself,” replies Mr. Snagsby.
“You’re right!” returns Mr. Bucket, shaking hands with him quite
affectionately. “—On account of which, and at the same time to
oblige a real good customer, you mean to go down with me, in
confidence, to Tom-all-Alone’s and to keep the whole thing quiet
ever afterwards and never mention it to any one. That’s about your
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in black mud and corrupt water—though the roads are dry elsewhere—
and reeking with such smells and sights that he, who has lived in Lon-
don all his life, can scarce believe his senses. Branching from this street
and its heaps of ruins are other streets and courts so infamous that Mr.
Snagsby sickens in body and mind and feels as if he were going every
moment deeper down into the infernal gulf.
“Draw off a bit here, Mr. Snagsby,” says Bucket as a kind of shabby
palanquin is borne towards them, surrounded by a noisy crowd.
“Here’s the fever coming up the street!”
As the unseen wretch goes by, the crowd, leaving that object of at-
traction, hovers round the three visitors like a dream of horrible faces
and fades away up alleys and into ruins and behind walls, and with
occasional cries and shrill whistles of warning, thenceforth flits about
them until they leave the place.
“Are those the fever-houses, Darby?” Mr. Bucket coolly asks as he
turns his bull’s-eye on a line of stinking ruins.
Darby replies that “all them are,” and further that in all, for months
and months, the people “have been down by dozens” and have been
carried out dead and dying “like sheep with the rot.” Bucket observing
to Mr. Snagsby as they go on again that he looks a little poorly, Mr.
Snagsby answers that he feels as if he couldn’t breathe the dreadful air.
There is inquiry made at various houses for a boy named Jo. As
few people are known in Tom-all-Alone’s by any Christian sign, there
is much reference to Mr. Snagsby whether he means Carrots, or the
Colonel, or Gallows, or Young Chisel, or Terrier Tip, or Lanky, or
the Brick. Mr. Snagsby describes over and over again. There are con-
flicting opinions respecting the original of his picture. Some think it
must be Carrots, some say the Brick. The Colonel is produced, but
is not at all near the thing. Whenever Mr. Snagsby and his conduc-
tors are stationary, the crowd flows round, and from its squalid depths
obsequious advice heaves up to Mr. Bucket. Whenever they move,
and the angry bull’s-eyes glare, it fades away and flits about them up
the alleys, and in the ruins, and behind the walls, as before.
At last there is a lair found out where Toughy, or the Tough
Subject, lays him down at night; and it is thought that the Tough
Subject may be Jo. Comparison of notes between Mr. Snagsby and
the proprietress of the house—a drunken face tied up in a black bundle,
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“Mine.”
The other woman, who was bending over it when they came in,
stoops down again and kisses it as it lies asleep.
“You seem as fond of it as if you were the mother yourself,” says
Mr. Bucket.
“I was the mother of one like it, master, and it died.”
“Ah, Jenny, Jenny!” says the other woman to her. “Better so. Much
better to think of dead than alive, Jenny! Much better!”
“Why, you an’t such an unnatural woman, I hope,” returns Bucket
sternly, “as to wish your own child dead?”
“God knows you are right, master,” she returns. “I am not. I’d
stand between it and death with my own life if I could, as true as any
pretty lady.”
“Then don’t talk in that wrong manner,” says Mr. Bucket, molli-
fied again. “Why do you do it?”
“It’s brought into my head, master,” returns the woman, her eyes
filling with tears, “when I look down at the child lying so. If it was
never to wake no more, you’d think me mad, I should take on so. I
know that very well. I was with Jenny when she lost hers—warn’t I,
Jenny?—and I know how she grieved. But look around you at this
place. Look at them,” glancing at the sleepers on the ground. “Look
at the boy you’re waiting for, who’s gone out to do me a good turn.
Think of the children that your business lays with often and
often, and that you see grow up!”
“Well, well,” says Mr. Bucket, “you train him respectable, and he’ll
be a comfort to you, and look after you in your old age, you know.”
“I mean to try hard,” she answers, wiping her eyes. “But I have
been a-thinking, being over-tired to-night and not well with the ague,
of all the many things that’ll come in his way. My master will be
against it, and he’ll be beat, and see me beat, and made to fear his
home, and perhaps to stray wild. If I work for him ever so much,
and ever so hard, there’s no one to help me; and if he should be
turned bad ‘spite of all I could do, and the time should come when I
should sit by him in his sleep, made hard and changed, an’t it likely I
should think of him as he lies in my lap now and wish he had died as
Jenny’s child died!”
“There, there!” says Jenny. “Liz, you’re tired and ill. Let me
take him.”
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In doing so, she displaces the mother’s dress, but quickly readjusts it
over the wounded and bruised bosom where the aby has been lying.
“It’s my dead child,” says Jenny, walking up and down as she nurses,
“that makes me love this child so dear, and it’s my dead child that
makes her love it so dear too, as even to think of its being taken away
from her now. While she thinks that, I think what fortune would I
give to have my darling back. But we mean the same thing, if we
knew how to say it, us two mothers does in our poor hearts!”
As Mr. Snagsby blows his nose and coughs his cough of sympathy,
a step is heard without. Mr. Bucket throws his light into the door-
way and says to Mr. Snagsby, “Now, what do you say to Toughy?
Will he do?”
“That’s Jo,” says Mr. Snagsby.
Jo stands amazed in the disk of light, like a ragged figure in a magic-
lantern, trembling to think that he has offended against the law in not
having moved on far enough. Mr. Snagsby, however, giving him the
consolatory assurance, “It’s only a job you will be paid for, Jo,” he
recovers; and on being taken outside by Mr. Bucket for a little private
confabulation, tells his tale satisfactorily, though out of breath.
“I have squared it with the lad,” says Mr. Bucket, returning, “and
it’s all right. Now, Mr. Snagsby, we’re ready for you.”
First, Jo has to complete his errand of good nature by handing
over the physic he has been to get, which he delivers with the laconic
verbal direction that “it’s to be all took d’rectly.” Secondly, Mr.
Snagsby has to lay upon the table half a crown, his usual panacea for
an immense variety of afflictions. Thirdly, Mr. Bucket has to take Jo
by the arm a little above the elbow and walk him on before him,
without which observance neither the Tough Subject nor any other
Subject could be professionally conducted to Lincoln’s Inn Fields.
These arrangements completed, they give the women good night
and come out once more into black and foul Tom-all-Alone’s.
By the noisome ways through which they descended into that pit,
they gradually emerge from it, the crowd flitting, and whistling, and
skulking about them until they come to the verge, where restoration
of the bull’s-eyes is made to Darby. Here the crowd, like a concourse
of imprisoned demons, turns back, yelling, and is seen no more.
Through the clearer and fresher streets, never so clear and fresh to
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Mr. Snagsby’s mind as now, they walk and ride until they come to
Mr. Tulkinghorn’s gate.
As they ascend the dim stairs (Mr. Tulkinghorn’s chambers being
on the first floor), Mr. Bucket mentions that he has the key of the
outer door in his pocket and that there is no need to ring. For a
man so expert in most things of that kind, Bucket takes time to
open the door and makes some noise too. It may be that he sounds
a note of preparation.
Howbeit, they come at last into the hall, where a lamp is burning, and
so into Mr. Tulkinghorn’s usual room—the room where he drank his old
wine to-night. He is not there, but his two old-fashioned candlesticks are,
and the room is tolerably light.
Mr. Bucket, still having his professional hold of Jo and appearing to
Mr. Snagsby to possess an unlimited number of eyes, makes a little way
into this room, when Jo starts and stops.
“What’s the matter?” says Bucket in a whisper.
“There she is!” cries Jo.
“Who!”
“The lady!”
A female figure, closely veiled, stands in the middle of the room,
where the light falls upon it. It is quite still and silent. The front of
the figure is towards them, but it takes no notice of their entrance
and remains like a statue.
“Now, tell me,” says Bucket aloud, “how you know that to be the
lady.”
“I know the wale,” replies Jo, staring, “and the bonnet, and the
gownd.”
“Be quite sure of what you say, Tough,” returns Bucket, narrowly
observant of him. “Look again.”
“I am a-looking as hard as ever I can look,” says Jo with starting
eyes, “and that there’s the wale, the bonnet, and the gownd.”
“What about those rings you told me of?” asks Bucket.
“A-sparkling all over here,” says Jo, rubbing the fingers of his left
hand on the knuckles of his right without taking his eyes from the
figure.
The figure removes the right-hand glove and shows the hand.
“Now, what do you say to that?” asks Bucket.
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Jo shakes his head. “Not rings a bit like them. Not a hand like
that.”
“What are you talking of?” says Bucket, evidently pleased though,
and well pleased too.
“Hand was a deal whiter, a deal delicater, and a deal smaller,” re-
turns Jo.
“Why, you’ll tell me I’m my own mother next,” says Mr. Bucket.
“Do you recollect the lady’s voice?”
“I think I does,” says Jo.
The figure speaks. “Was it at all like this? I will speak as long as you
like if you are not sure. Was it this voice, or at all like this voice?”
Jo looks aghast at Mr. Bucket. “Not a bit!”
“Then, what,” retorts that worthy, pointing to the figure, “did you
say it was the lady for?”
“Cos,” says Jo with a perplexed stare but without being at all shaken in his
certainty, “cos that there’s the wale, the bonnet, and the gownd. It is her and
it an’t her. It an’t her hand, nor yet her rings, nor yet her woice. But that there’s
the wale, the bonnet, and the gownd, and they’re wore the same way wot she
wore ‘em, and it’s her height wot she wos, and she giv me a sov’ring and
hooked it.”
“Well!” says Mr. Bucket slightly, “we haven’t got much good out of
you. But, however, here’s five shillings for you. Take care how you
spend it, and don’t get yourself into trouble.” Bucket stealthily tells the
coins from one hand into the other like counters—which is a way he
has, his principal use of them being in these games of skill—and then
puts them, in a little pile, into the boy’s hand and takes him out to the
door, leaving Mr. Snagsby, not by any means comfortable under these
mysterious circumstances, alone with the veiled figure. But on Mr.
Tulkinghorn’s coming into the room, the veil is raised and a suffi-
ciently good-looking Frenchwoman is revealed, though her expression
is something of the intensest.
“Thank you, Mademoiselle Hortense,” says Mr. Tulkinghorn with
his usual equanimity. “I will give you no further trouble about this
little wager.”
“You will do me the kindness to remember, sir, that I am not at
present placed?” says mademoiselle.
“Certainly, certainly!”
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CHAPTER XXIII
Esther’s Narrative
She was so singularly earnest that I drew back, almost afraid of her.
Without appearing to notice it, in her ardour she still
pressed herself upon me, speaking in a rapid subdued voice, though
always with a certain grace and propriety.
“Mademoiselle, I come from the South country where we are quick
and where we like and dislike very strong. My Lady was too high for
me; I was too high for her. It is done—past—finlshed! Receive me as
your domestic, and I will serve you well. I will do more for you than
you figure to yourself now. Chut! Mademoiselle, I will—no matter,
I will do my utmost possible in all things. If you accept my service,
you will not repent it. Mademoiselle, you will not repent it, and I
will serve you well. You don’t know how well!”
There was a lowering energy in her face as she stood looking at me
while I explained the impossibility of my engagmg her (without think-
ing it necessary to say how very little I desired to do so), which seemed
to bring visibly before me some woman from the streets of Paris in
the reign of terror.
She heard me out without interruption and then said with her pretty
accent and in her mildest voice, “Hey, mademoiselle, I have received
my answer! I am sorry of it. But I must go elsewhere and seek what I
have not found here. Will you graciously let me kiss your hand?”
She looked at me more intently as she took it, and seemed to take
note, with her momentary touch, of every vein in it. “I fear I sur-
prised you, mademoiselle, on the day of the storm?” she said with a
parting curtsy.
I confessed that she had surprised us all.
“I took an oath, mademoiselle,” she said, smiling, “and I wanted
to stamp it on my mind so that I might keep it faithfully. And I will!
Adieu, mademoiselle!”
So ended our conference, which I was very glad to bring to a close.
I supposed she went away from the village, for I saw her no more;
and nothing else occurred to disturb our tranquil summer pleasures
until six weeks were out and we returned home as I began just now
by saying.
At that time, and for a good many weeks after that time, Richard
was constant in his visits. Besides coming every Saturday or Sunday
and remaining with us until Monday morning, he sometimes rode
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“And you don’t think it’s an answer, eh? Well! Perhaps it’s not.
Settled? You mean, do I feel as if I were settling down?”
“Yes.”
“Why, no, I can’t say I am settling down,” said Richard, strongly
emphasizing “down,” as if that expressed the difficulty, “because one
can’t settle down while this business remains in such an unsettled state.
When I say this business, of course I mean the—forbidden subject.”
“Do you think it will ever be in a settled state?” said I.
“Not the least doubt of it,” answered Richard.
We walked a little way without speaking, and presently Richard
addressed me in his frankest and most feeling manner, thus: “My
dear Esther, I understand you, and I wish to heaven I were a more
constant sort of fellow. I don’t mean constant to Ada, for I love her
dearly—better and better every day—but constant to myself. (Some-
how, I mean something that I can’t very well express, but you’ll make
it out.) If I were a more constant sort of fellow, I should have held on
either to Badger or to Kenge and Carboy like grim death, and should
have begun to be steady and systematic by this time, and shouldn’t
be in debt, and—”
“Are you in debt, Richard?”
“Yes,” said Richard, “I am a little so, my dear. Also, I have
taken rather too much to billiards and that sort of thing. Now the
murder’s out; you despise me, Esther, don’t you?”
“You know I don’t,” said I.
“You are kinder to me than I often am to myself,” he returned.
“My dear Esther, I am a very unfortunate dog not to be more settled,
but how can I be more settled? If you lived in an unfinished house,
you couldn’t settle down in it; if you were condemned to leave every-
thing you undertook unfinished, you would find it hard to apply
yourself to anything; and yet that’s my unhappy case. I was born into
this unfinished contention with all its chances and changes, and it
began to unsettle me before I quite knew the difference between a
suit at law and a suit of clothes; and it has gone on unsettling me ever
since; and here I am now, conscious sometimes that I am but a worth-
less fellow to love my confiding cousin Ada.”
We were in a solitary place, and he put his hands before his eyes
and sobbed as he said the words.
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can lock ourselves in and I can tell you comfortably what I wanted to
see your dear good face about.”
“Very well, my dear,” said I. “Nothing could be better.” So Caddy,
after affectionately squeezing the dear good face as she called it, locked
the gate, and took my arm, and we began to walk round the garden
very cosily.
“You see, Esther,” said Caddy, who thoroughly enjoyed a little con-
fidence, “after you spoke to me about its being wrong to marry with-
out Ma’s knowledge, or even to keep Ma long in the dark respecting
our engagement—though I don’t believe Ma cares much for me, I
must say—I thought it right to mention your opinions to Prince. In
the first place because I want to profit by everything you tell me, and
in the second place because I have no secrets from Prince.”
“I hope he approved, Caddy?”
“Oh, my dear! I assure you he would approve of anything you
could say. You have no idea what an opimon he has of you!”
“Indeed!”
“Esther, it’s enough to make anybody but me jealous,” said Caddy,
laughing and shaking her head; “but it only makes me joyful, for you
are the first friend I ever had, and the best friend I ever can have, and
nobody can respect and love you too much to please me.”
“Upon my word, Caddy,” said I, “you are in the general conspiracy
to keep me in a good humour. Well, my dear?”
“Well! I am going to tell you,” replied Caddy, crossing her hands
confidentially upon my arm. “So we talked a good deal about it, and
so I said to Prince, ‘Prince, as Miss Summerson—”
“I hope you didn’t say ‘Miss Summerson’?”
“No. I didn’t!” cried Caddy, greatly pleased and with the
brightest of faces. “I said, ‘Esther.’ I said to Prince, ‘As Esther is decid-
edly of that opinion, Prince, and has expressed it to me, and always
hints it when she writes those kind notes, which you are so fond of
hearing me read to you, I am prepared to disclose the truth to Ma
whenever you think proper. And I think, Prince,’ said I, ‘that Esther
thinks that I should be in a better, and truer, and more honourable
position altogether if you did the same to your papa.’”
“Yes, my dear,” said I. “Esther certainly does think so.”
“So I was right, you see!” exclaimed Caddy. “Well! This troubled
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Prince a good deal, not because he had the least doubt about it, but
because he is so considerate of the feelings of old Mr. Turveydrop; and
he had his apprehensions that old Mr. Turveydrop might break his
heart, or faint away, or be very much overcome in some affecting man-
ner or other if he made such an announcement. He feared old Mr.
Turveydrop might consider it undutiful and might receive too great a
shock. For old Mr. Turveydrop’s deportment is very beautiful, you
know, Esther,” said Caddy, “and his feelings are extremely sensitive.”
“Are they, my dear?”
“Oh, extremely sensitive. Prince says so. Now, this has caused my
darling child—I didn’t mean to use the expression to you, Esther,”
Caddy apologized, her face suffused with blushes, “but I generally
call Prince my darling child.”
I laughed; and Caddy laughed and blushed, and went on’
“This has caused him, Esther—”
“Caused whom, my dear?”
“Oh, you tiresome thing!” said Caddy, laughing, with her pretty
face on fire. “My darling child, if you insist upon it! This has caused
him weeks of uneasiness and has made him delay, from day to day, in
a very anxious manner. At last he said to me, ‘Caddy, if Miss
Summerson, who is a great favourite with my father, could be pre-
vailed upon to be present when I broke the subject, I think I could do
it.’ So I promised I would ask you. And I made up my mind, besides,”
said Caddy, looking at me hopefully but timidly, “that if you con-
sented, I would ask you afterwards to come with me to Ma. This is
what I meant when I said in my note that I had a great favour and a
great assistance to beg of you. And if you thought you could grant it,
Esther, we should both be very grateful.”
“Let me see, Caddy,” said I, pretending to consider. “Really, I think
I could do a greater thing than that if the need were pressing. I am at
your service and the darling child’s, my dear, whenever you like.”
Caddy was quite transported by this reply of mine, being, I be-
lieve, as susceptible to the least kindness or encouragement as any
tender heart that ever beat in this world; and after another turn or
two round the garden, during which she put on an entirely new pair
of gloves and made herself as resplendent as possible that she might
do no avoidable discredit to the Master of Deportment, we went to
Newman Street direct.
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upright on the sofa again with his cheeks puffing over his stiff cravat,
a perfect model of parental deportment.
“My son!” said Mr. Turveydrop. “My children! I cannot resist your
prayer. Be happy!”
His benignity as he raised his future daughter-in-law and stretched
out his hand to his son (who kissed it with affectionate respect and
gratitude) was the most confusing sight I ever saw.
“My children,” said Mr. Turveydrop, paternally encircling Caddy
with his left arm as she sat beside him, and putting his right hand
gracefully on his hip. “My son and daughter, your happiness shall be
my care. I will watch over you. You shall always live with me”—
meaning, of course, I will always live with you—”this house is hence-
forth as much yours as mine; consider it your home. May you long
live to share it with me!”
The power of his deportment was such that they really were as
much overcome with thankfulness as if, instead of quartering him-
self upon them for the rest of his life, he were making some munifi-
cent sacrifice in their favour.
“For myself, my children,” said Mr. Turveydrop, “I am falling into
the sear and yellow leaf, and it is impossible to say how long the last
feeble traces of gentlemanly deportment may linger in this weaving
and spinning age. But, so long, I will do my duty to society and will
show myself, as usual, about town. My wants are few and simple.
My little apartment here, my few essentials for the toilet, my frugal
morning meal, and my little dinner will suffice. I charge your dutiful
affection with the supply of these requirements, and I charge myself
with all the rest.”
They were overpowered afresh by his uncommon generosity.
“My son,” said Mr. Turveydrop, “for those little points in which
you are deficient—points of deportment, which are born with a man,
which may be improved by cultivation, but can never be originated—
you may still rely on me. I have been faithful to my post since the days
of his Royal Highness the Prince Regent, and I will not desert it now.
No, my son. If you have ever contemplated your father’s poor posi-
tion with a feeling of pride, you may rest assured that he will do noth-
ing to tarnish it. For yourself, Prince, whose character is different (we
cannot be all alike, nor is it advisable that we should), work, be indus-
trious, earn money, and extend the connexion as much as possible.”
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“That you may depend I will do, dear father, with all my heart,”
replied Prince.
“I have no doubt of it,” said Mr. Turveydrop. “Your qualities are
not shining, my dear child, but they are steady and useful. And to
both of you, my children, I would merely observe, in the spirit of a
sainted wooman on whose path I had the happiness of casting, I
believe, some ray of light, take care of the establishment, take care of
my simple wants, and bless you both!”
Old Mr. Turveydrop then became so very gallant, in honour of the
occasion, that I told Caddy we must really go to Thavies Inn at once if
we were to go at all that day. So we took our departure after a very loving
farewell between Caddy and her betrothed, and during our walk she was
so happy and so full of old Mr. Turveydrop’s praises that I would not
have said a word in his disparagement for any consideration.
The house in Thavies Inn had bills in the windows annoucing that
it was to let, and it looked dirtier and gloomier and ghastlier than
ever. The name of poor Mr. Jellyby had appeared in the list of bank-
rupts but a day or two before, and he was shut up in the dining-
room with two gentlemen and a heap of blue bags, account-books,
and papers, making the most desperate endeavours to understand his
affairs. They appeared to me to be quite beyond his comprehension,
for when Caddy took me into the dining-room by mistake and we
came upon Mr. Jellyby in his spectacles, forlornly fenced into a cor-
ner by the great dining-table and the two gentlemen, he seemed to
have given up the whole thing and to be
speechless and insensible.
Going upstairs to Mrs. Jellyby’s room (the children were all
screaming in the kitchen, and there was no servant to be seen), we
found that lady in the midst of a voluminous correspondence, open-
ing, reading, and sorting letters, with a great accumulation of torn
covers on the floor. She was so preoccupied that at first she did not
know me, though she sat looking at me with that curious, bright-
eyed, far-off look of hers.
“Ah! Miss Summerson!” she said at last. “I was thinking of
something so different! I hope you are well. I am happy to see you.
Mr. Jarndyce and Miss Clare quite well?”
I hoped in return that Mr. Jellyby was quite well.
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“Why, not quite, my dear,” said Mrs. Jellyby in the calmest man-
ner. “He has been unfortunate in his affairs and is a little out of
spirits. Happily for me, I am so much engaged that I have no time to
think about it. We have, at the present moment, one hundred and
seventy families, Miss Summerson, averaging five persons in each,
either gone or going to the left bank of the Niger.”
I thought of the one family so near us who were neither gone nor
going to the left bank of the Niger, and wondered how she could be
so placid.
“You have brought Caddy back, I see,” observed Mrs. Jellyby with
a glance at her daughter. “It has become quite a novelty to see her
here. She has almost deserted her old employment and in fact obliges
me to employ a boy.”
“I am sure, Ma—” began Caddy.
“Now you know, Caddy,” her mother mildly interposed, “that I
do employ a boy, who is now at his dinner. What is the use of your
contradicting?”
“I was not going to contradict, Ma,” returned Caddy. “I was only
going to say that surely you wouldn’t have me be a mere drudge all
my life.”
“I believe, my dear,” said Mrs. Jellyby, still opening her letters,
casting her bright eyes smilingly over them, and sorting them as she
spoke, “that you have a business example before you in your mother.
Besides. A mere drudge? If you had any sympathy with the destinies
of the human race, it would raise you high above any such idea. But
you have none. I have often told you, Caddy, you have no such
sympathy.”
“Not if it’s Africa, Ma, I have not.”
“Of course you have not. Now, if I were not happily so much
engaged, Miss Summerson,” said Mrs. Jellyby, sweetly casting her
eyes for a moment on me and considering where to put the particu-
lar letter she had just opened, “this would distress and disappoint me.
But I have so much to think of, in connexion with Borrioboola-Gha
and it is so necessary I should concentrate myself that there is my
remedy, you see.”
As Caddy gave me a glance of entreaty, and as Mrs. Jellyby was
looking far away into Africa straight through my bonnet and head, I
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Summerson, it was very kind of you to come here to help out this
silly chit. Good-bye! When I tell you that I have fifty-eight new
letters from manufacturing families anxious to understand the de-
tails of the native and coffee-cultivation question this morning, I
need not apologize for having very little leisure.”
I was not surprised by Caddy’s being in low spirits when we went
downstairs, or by her sobbing afresh on my neck, or by her saying
she would far rather have been scolded than treated with such indif-
ference, or by her confiding to me that she was so poor in clothes
that how she was ever to be married creditably she didn’t know. I
gradually cheered her up by dwelling on the many things she would
do for her unfortunate father and for Peepy when she had a home of
her own; and finally we went downstairs into the damp dark kitchen,
where Peepy and his little brothers and sisters were grovelling on the
stone floor and where we had such a game of play with them that to
prevent myself from being quite torn to pieces I was obliged to fall
back on my fairy-tales. From time to time I heard loud voices in the
parlour overhead, and occasionally a violent tumbling about of the
furniture. The last effect I am afraid was caused by poor Mr. Jellyby’s
breaking away from the dining-table and making rushes at the win-
dow with the intention of throwing himself into the area whenever
he made any new attempt to understand his affairs.
As I rode quietly home at night after the day’s bustle, I thought a
good deal of Caddy’s engagement and felt confirmed in my hopes
(in spite of the elder Mr. Turveydrop) that she would be the happier
and better for it. And if there seemed to be but a slender chance of
her and her husband ever finding out what the model of deportment
really was, why that was all for the best too, and who would wish
them to be wiser? I did not wish them to be any wiser and indeed
was half ashamed of not entirely believing in him myself. And I
looked up at the stars, and thought about travellers in distant coun-
tries and the stars they saw, and hoped I might always be so blest and
happy as to be useful to some one in my small way.
They were so glad to see me when I got home, as they always
were, that I could have sat down and cried for joy if that had not
been a method of making myself disagreeable. Everybody in the
house, from the lowest to the highest, showed me such a bright
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CHAPTER XXIV
An Appeal Case
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of age. At last an appointment was made for him to see the Lord
Chancellor again in his private room, and there the Lord Chancellor
very seriously reproved him for trifling with time and not knowing
his mind—”a pretty good joke, I think,” said Richard, “from that
quarter!”—and at last it was settled that his application should be
granted. His name was entered at the Horse Guards as an applicant
for an ensign’s commission; the purchase-money was deposited at an
agent’s; and Richard, in his usual characteristic way, plunged into a
violent course of military study and got up at five o’clock every morn-
ing to practise the broadsword exercise.
Thus, vacation succeeded term, and term succeeded vacation. We
sometimes heard of Jarndyce and Jarndyce as being in the paper or
out of the paper, or as being to be mentioned, or as being to be
spoken to; and it came on, and it went off. Richard, who was now in
a professor’s house in London, was able to be with us less frequently
than before; my guardian still maintained the same reserve; and so
time passed until the commission was obtained and Richard received
directions with it to join a regiment in Ireland.
He arrived post-haste with the intelligence one evening, and had a
long conference with my guardian. Upwards of an hour elapsed be-
fore my guardian put his head into the room where Ada and I were
sitting and said, “Come in, my dears!” We went in and found Rich-
ard, whom we had last seen in high spirits, leaning on the chimney-
piece looking mortified and angry.
“Rick and I, Ada,” said Mr. Jarndyce, “are not quite of one mind.
Come, come, Rick, put a brighter face upon it!”
“You are very hard with me, sir,” said Richard. “The harder
because you have been so considerate to me in all other respects and
have done me kindnesses that I can never acknowledge. I never could
have been set right without you, sir.”
“Well, well!” said Mr. Jarndyce. “I want to set you more right yet.
I want to set you more right with yourself.”
“I hope you will excuse my saying, sir,” returned Richard in a
fiery way, but yet respectfully, “that I think I am the best judge
about myself.”
“I hope you will excuse my saying, my dear Rick,” observed Mr.
Jarndyce with the sweetest cheerfulness and good humour, “that’s it’s
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quite natural in you to think so, but I don’t think so. I must do my
duty, Rick, or you could never care for me in cool blood; and I hope
you will always care for me, cool and hot.”
Ada had turned so pale that he made her sit down in his reading-
chair and sat beside her.
“It’s nothing, my dear,” he said, “it’s nothing. Rick and I have only
had a friendly difference, which we must state to you, for you are the
theme. Now you are afraid of what’s coming.”
“I am not indeed, cousin John,” replied Ada with a smile, “if it is
to come from you.”
“Thank you, my dear. Do you give me a minute’s calm attention,
without looking at Rick. And, little woman, do you likewise. My dear
girl,” putting his hand on hers as it lay on the side of the easy-chair,
“you recollect the talk we had, we four when the little woman told me
of a little love affair?”
“It is not likely that either Richard or I can ever forget your kind-
ness that day, cousin John.”
“I can never forget it,” said Richard.
“And I can never forget it,” said Ada.
“So much the easier what I have to say, and so much the easier for us
to agree,” returned my guardian, his face irradiated by the gentleness
and honour of his heart. “Ada, my bird, you should know that Rick
has now chosen his profession for the last time. All that he has of
certainty will be expended when he is fully equipped. He has exhausted
his resources and is bound henceforward to the tree he has planted.”
“Quite true that I have exhausted my present resources, and I am
quite content to know it. But what I have of certainty, sir,” said
Richard, “is not all I have.”
“Rick, Rick!” cried my guardian with a sudden terror in his man-
ner, and in an altered voice, and putting up his hands as if he would
have stopped his ears. “For the love of God, don’t found a hope or
expectation on the family curse! Whatever you do on this side the
grave, never give one lingering glance towards the horrible phan-
tom that has haunted us so many years. Better to borrow, better to
beg, better to die!”
We were all startled by the fervour of this warning. Richard bit his
lip and held his breath, and glanced at me as if he felt, and knew that
I felt too, how much he needed it.
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I beg your pardon,” said Mr. George, sitting stiffly upright and squar-
ing an elbow on each knee, “but I believe you’re a Chancery suitor, if
I have heard correct?”
“I am sorry to say I am.”
“I have had one of your compatriots in my time, sir.”
“A Chancery suitor?” returned my guardian. “How was that?”
“Why, the man was so badgered and worried and tortured by being
knocked about from post to pillar, and from pillar to post,” said Mr.
George, “that he got out of sorts. I don’t believe he had any idea of taking
aim at anybody, but he was in that condition of resentment and violence
that he would come and pay for fifty shots and fire away till he was red
hot. One day I said to him when there was nobody by and he had been
talking to me angrily about his wrongs, ‘If this practice is a safety-valve,
comrade, well and good; but I don’t altogether like your being so bent
upon it in your present state of mind; I’d rather you took to something
else.’ I was on my guard for a blow, he was that passionate; but he re-
ceived it in very good part and left off directly. We shook hands and
struck up a sort of friendship.”
“What was that man?” asked my guardian in a new tone of interest.
“Why, he began by being a small Shropshire farmer before they
made a baited bull of him,” said Mr. George.
“Was his name Gridley?”
“It was, sir.”
Mr. George directed another succession of quick bright glances at
me as my guardian and I exchanged a word or two of surprise at the
coincidence, and I therefore explained to him how we knew the name.
He made me another of his soldierly bows in acknowledgment of
what he called my condescension.
“I don’t know,” he said as he looked at me, “what it is that sets me
off again—but—bosh! What’s my head running against!” He passed
one of his heavy hands over his crisp dark hair as if to sweep the
broken thoughts out of his mind and sat a little forward, with one
arm akimbo and the other resting on his leg, looking in a brown
study at the ground.
“I am sorry to learn that the same state of mind has got this Gridley
into new troubles and that he is in hiding,” said my guardian.
“So I am told, sir,” returned Mr. George, still musing and looking
on the ground. “So I am told.”
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arm, to the great entertainment of some idlers who were looking on,
he was so discomposed and begged me so respectfully “not to desert
him” that I could not make up my mind to do it, especially as Miss
Flite was always tractable with me and as she too said, “Fitz Jarndyce,
my dear, you will accompany us, of course.” As Richard seemed quite
willing, and even anxious, that we should see them safely to their
destination, we agreed to do so. And as Mr. George informed us that
Gridley’s mind had run on Mr. Jarndyce all the afternoon after hear-
ing of their interview in the morning, I wrote a hasty note in pencil
to my guardian to say where we were gone and why. Mr. George
sealed it at a coffee-house, that it might lead to no discovery, and we
sent it off by a ticket-porter.
We then took a hackney-coach and drove away to the neighbourhood
of Leicester Square. We walked through some narrow courts, for which
Mr. George apologized, and soon came to the shooting gallery, the door of
which was closed. As he pulled a bell-handle which hung by a chain to the
door-post, a very respectable old gentleman with grey hair, wearing spec-
tacles, and dressed in a black spencer and gaiters and a broad-brimmed hat,
and carrying a large gold-beaded cane, addressed him.
“I ask your pardon, my good friend,” said he, “but is this George’s
Shooting Gallery?”
“It is, sir,” returned Mr. George, glancing up at the great letters in which
that inscription was painted on the whitewashed wall.
“Oh! To be sure!” said the old gentleman, following his eyes.
“Thank you. Have you rung the bell?”
“My name is George, sir, and I have rung the bell.”
“Oh, indeed?” said the old gentleman. “Your name is George? Then
I am here as soon as you, you see. You came for me, no doubt?”
“No, sir. You have the advantage of me.”
“Oh, indeed?” said the old gentleman. “Then it was your young
man who came for me. I am a physician and was requested—five
minutes ago—to come and visit a sick man at George’s Shooting
Gallery.”
“The muffled drums,” said Mr. George, turning to Richard and
me and gravely shaking his head. “It’s quite correct, sir. Will you
please to walk in.”
The door being at that moment opened by a very singular-look-
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ing little man in a green-baize cap and apron, whose face and hands
and dress were blackened all over, we passed along a dreary passage
into a large building with bare brick walls where there were targets,
and guns, and swords, and other things of that kind. When we had
all arrived here, the physician stopped, and taking off his hat, ap-
peared to vanish by magic and to leave another and quite a different
man in his place.
“Now lookee here, George,” said the man, turning quickly round
upon him and tapping him on the breast with a large forefinger. “You
know me, and I know you. You’re a man of the world, and I’m a man
of the world. My name’s Bucket, as you are aware, and I have got a
peace-warrant against Gridley. You have kept him out of the way a
long time, and you have been artful in it, and it does you credit.”
Mr. George, looking hard at him, bit his lip and shook his head.
“Now, George,” said the other, keeping close to him, “you’re a
sensible man and a well-conducted man; that’s what you are, beyond
a doubt. And mind you, I don’t talk to you as a common character,
because you have served your country and you know that when duty
calls we must obey. Consequently you’re very far from wanting to
give trouble. If I required assistance, you’d assist me; that’s what you’d
do. Phil Squod, don’t you go a-sidling round the gallery like that”—
the dirty little man was shuffling about with his shoulder against the
wall, and his eyes on the intruder, in a manner that looked threaten-
ing—”because I know you and won’t have it.”
“Phil!” said Mr. George.
“Yes, guv’ner.”
“Be quiet.”
The little man, with a low growl, stood still.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” said Mr. Bucket, “you’ll excuse anything
that may appear to be disagreeable in this, for my name’s Inspector
Bucket of the Detective, and I have a duty to perform. George, I
know where my man is because I was on the roof last night and saw
him through the skylight, and you along with him. He is in there,
you know,” pointing; “that’s where he is—on a sofy. Now I must see
my man, and I must tell my man to consider himself in custody; but
you know me, and you know I don’t want to take any uncomfort-
able measures. You give me your word, as from one man to another
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(and an old soldier, mind you, likewise), that it’s honourable be-
tween us two, and I’ll accommodate you to the utmost of my power.”
“I give it,” was the reply. ‘“But it wasn’t handsome in you, Mr.
Bucket.”
“Gammon, George! Not handsome?” said Mr. Bucket, tapping
him on his broad breast again and shaking hands with him. “I don’t
say it wasn’t handsome in you to keep my man so close, do I? Be
equally good-tempered to me, old boy! Old William Tell, Old Shaw,
the Life Guardsman! Why, he’s a model of the whole British army in
himself, ladies and gentlemen. I’d give a fifty-pun’ note to be such a
figure of a man!”
The affair being brought to this head, Mr. George, after a little
consideration, proposed to go in first to his comrade (as he called
him), taking Miss Flite with him. Mr. Bucket agreeing, they went
away to the further end of the gallery, leaving us sitting and standing
by a table covered with guns. Mr. Bucket took this opportunity of
entering into a little light conversation, asking me if I were afraid of
fire-arms, as most young ladies were; asking Richard if he were a
good shot; asking Phil Squod which he considered the best of those
rifles and what it might be worth first-hand, telling him in return
that it was a pity he ever gave way to his temper, for he was naturally
so amiable that he might have been a young woman, and making
himself generally agreeable.
After a time he followed us to the further end of the gallery, and
Richard and I were going quietly away when Mr. George came after us.
He said that if we had no objection to see his comrade, he would take
a visit from us very kindly. The words had hardly passed his lips when
the bell was rung and my guardian appeared, “on the chance,” he slightly
observed, “of being able to do any little thing for a poor fellow in-
volved in the same misfortune as himself.” We all four went back
together and went into the place where Gridley was.
It was a bare room, partitioned off from the gallery with unpainted
wood. As the screening was not more than eight or ten feet high and
only enclosed the sides, not the top, the rafters of the high gallery
roof were overhead, and the skylight through which Mr. Bucket had
looked down. The sun was low—near setting—and its light came
redly in above, without descending to the ground. Upon a plain
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What do you say to coming along with me, upon this warrant, and
having a good angry argument before the magistrates? It’ll do you
good; it’ll freshen you up and get you into training for another turn
at the Chancellor. Give in? Why, I am surprised to hear a man of
your energy talk of giving in. You mustn’t do that. You’re half the fun
of the fair in the Court of Chancery. George, you lend Mr. Gridley a
hand, and let’s see now whether he won’t be better up than down.”
“He is very weak,” said the trooper in a low voice.
“Is he?” returned Bucket anxiously. “I only want to rouse him. I
don’t like to see an old acquaintance giving in like this. It would
cheer him up more than anything if I could make him a little waxy
with me. He’s welcome to drop into me, right and left, if he likes. I
shall never take advantage of it.”
The roof rang with a scream from Miss Flite, which still rings in
my ears.
“Oh, no, Gridley!” she cried as he fell heavily and calmly back
from before her. “Not without my blessing. After so many years!”
The sun was down, the light had gradually stolen from the roof,
and the shadow had crept upward. But to me the shadow of that
pair, one living and one dead, fell heavier on Richard’s departure than
the darkness of the darkest night. And through Richard’s farewell
words I heard it echoed: “Of all my old associations, of all my old
pursuits and hopes, of all the living and the dead world, this one
poor soul alone comes natural to me, and I am fit for. There is a tie
of many suffering years between us two, and it is the only tie I ever
had on earth that Chancery has not broken!”
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CHAPTER XXV
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preparations for the Oil Trade come, the evening comes. Comes Mr.
Snagsby in his black coat; come the Chadbands; come (when the
gorging vessel is replete) the ‘prentices and Guster, to be edified; comes
at last, with his slouching head, and his shuflle backward, and his
shuffle forward, and his shuffle to the right, and his shuffle to the
left, and his bit of fur cap in his muddy hand, which he picks as if it
were some mangy bird he had caught and was plucking before eating
raw, Jo, the very, very tough subject Mr. Chadband is to improve.
Mrs. Snagsby screws a watchful glance on Jo as he is brought into
the little drawing-room by Guster. He looks at Mr. Snagsby the
moment he comes in. Aha! Why does he look at Mr. Snagsby? Mr.
Snagsby looks at him. Why should he do that, but that Mrs. Snagsby
sees it all? Why else should that look pass between them, why else
should Mr. Snagsby be confused and cough a signal cough behind
his hand? It is as clear as crystal that Mr. Snagsby is that boy’s father.
‘“Peace, my friends,” says Chadband, rising and wiping the oily
exudations from his reverend visage. “Peace be with us! My friends,
why with us? Because,” with his fat smile, “it cannot be against us,
because it must be for us; because it is not hardening, because it is
softening; because it does not make war like the hawk, but comes
home unto us like the dove. Therefore, my friends, peace be with us!
My human boy, come forward!”
Stretching forth his flabby paw, Mr. Chadband lays the same on
Jo’s arm and considers where to station him. Jo, very doubtful of his
reverend friend’s intentions and not at all clear but that something
practical and painful is going to be done to him, mutters, “You let
me alone. I never said nothink to you. You let me alone.”
“No, my young friend,” says Chadband smoothly, “I will not let
you alone. And why? Because I am a harvest-labourer, because I am a
toiler and a moiler, because you are delivered over unto me and are
become as a precious instrument in my hands. My friends, may I so
employ this instrument as to use it to your advantage, to your profit,
to your gain, to your welfare, to your enrichment! My young friend,
sit upon this stool.”
Jo, apparently possessed by an impression that the reverend gentle-
man wants to cut his hair, shields his head with both arms and is got
into the required position with great difficulty and every possible
manifestation of reluctance.
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having been induced by Mrs. Snagsby’s screaming. She has her own
supper of bread and cheese to hand to Jo, with whom she ventures to
interchange a word or so for the first time.
“Here’s something to eat, poor boy,” says Guster.
“Thank’ee, mum,” says Jo.
“Are you hungry?”
“Jist!” says Jo.
“What’s gone of your father and your mother, eh?”
Jo stops in the middle of a bite and looks petrified. For this or-
phan charge of the Christian saint whose shrine was at Tooting has
patted him on the shoulder, and it is the first time in his life that any
decent hand has been so laid upon him.
“I never know’d nothink about ‘em,” says Jo.
“No more didn’t I of mine,” cries Guster. She is repressing
symptoms favourable to the fit when she seems to take alarm at
something and vanishes down the stairs.
“Jo,” whispers the law-stationer softly as the boy lingers on the
step.
“Here I am, Mr. Snagsby!”
“I didn’t know you were gone—there’s another half-crown, Jo. It
was quite right of you to say nothing about the lady the other night
when we were out together. It would breed trouble. You can’t be too
quiet, Jo.”
“I am fly, master!”
And so, good night.
A ghostly shade, frilled and night-capped, follows the law-
stationer to the room he came from and glides higher up. And hence-
forth he begins, go where he will, to be attended by another shadow
than his own, hardly less constant than his own, hardly less quiet
than his own. And into whatsoever atmosphere of secrecy his own
shadow may pass, let all concerned in the secrecy beware! For the
watchful Mrs. Snagsby is there too—bone of his bone, flesh of his
flesh, shadow of his shadow.
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CHAPTER XXVI
Sharpshooters
WINTRY MORNING, LOOKING with dull eyes and sallow face upon the
neighbourhood of Leicester Square, finds its inhabitants unwilling
to get out of bed. Many of them are not early risers at the brightest
of times, being birds of night who roost when the sun is high and are
wide awake and keen for prey when the stars shine out. Behind dingy
blind and curtain, in upper story and garret, skulking more or less
under false names, false hair, false titles, false jewellery, and false his-
tories, a colony of brigands lie in their first sleep. Gentlemen of the
green-baize road who could discourse from personal experience of
foreign galleys and home treadmills; spies of strong governments
that eternally quake with weakness and miserable fear, broken trai-
tors, cowards, bullies, gamesters, shufflers, swindlers, and false wit-
nesses; some not unmarked by the branding-iron beneath their dirty
braid; all with more cruelty in them than was in Nero, and more
crime than is in Newgate. For howsoever bad the devil can be in
fustian or smock-frock (and he can be very bad in both), he is a more
designing, callous, and intolerable devil when he sticks a pin in his
shirt-front, calls himself a gentleman, backs a card or colour, plays a
game or so of billiards, and knows a little about bills and promissory
notes than in any other form he wears. And in such form Mr. Bucket
shall find him, when he will, still pervading the tributary channels of
Leicester Square.
But the wintry morning wants him not and wakes him not. It
wakes Mr. George of the shooting gallery and his familiar. They arise,
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roll up and stow away their mattresses. Mr. George, having shaved
himself before a looking-glass of minute proportions, then marches
out, bare-headed and bare-chested, to the pump in the little yard and
anon comes back shining with yellow soap, friction, drifting rain,
and exceedingly cold water. As he rubs himself upon a large jack-
towel, blowing like a military sort of diver just come up, his hair
curling tighter and tighter on his sunburnt temples the more
he rubs it so that it looks as if it never could be loosened by any less
coercive instrument than an iron rake or a curry-comb—as he rubs,
and puffs, and polishes, and blows, turning his head from side to side
the more conveniently to excoriate his throat, and standing with his
body well bent forward to keep the wet from his martial legs, Phil, on
his knees lighting a fire, looks round as if it were enough washing for
him to see all that done, and sufficient renovation for one day to take
in the superfluous health his master throws off.
When Mr. George is dry, he goes to work to brush his head with
two hard brushes at once, to that unmerciful degree that Phil, shoul-
dering his way round the gallery in the act of sweeping it, winks with
sympathy. This chafing over, the ornamental part of Mr. George’s
toilet is soon performed. He fills his pipe, lights it, and marches up
and down smoking, as his custom is, while Phil, raising a powerful
odour of hot rolls and coffee, prepares breakfast. He smokes gravely
and marches in slow time. Perhaps this morning’s pipe is devoted to
the memory of Gridley in his grave.
“And so, Phil,” says George of the shooting gallery after several
turns in silence, “you were dreaming of the country last night?”
Phil, by the by, said as much in a tone of surprise as he scrambled
out of bed.
“Yes, guv’ner.”
“What was it like?”
“I hardly know what it was like, guv’ner,” said Phil, considering.
“How did you know it was the country?”
“On account of the grass, I think. And the swans upon it,” says
Phil after further consideration.
“What were the swans doing on the grass?”
“They was a-eating of it, I expect,” says Phil.
The master resumes his march, and the man resumes his prepara-
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and saucer and hastily removing his plate from his knees, “and says to
me, ‘What, comrade! You have been in the wars!’ I didn’t say much
to you, commander, then, for I was took by surprise that a person so
strong and healthy and bold as you was should stop to speak to such
a limping bag of bones as I was. But you says to me, says you, deliv-
ering it out of your chest as hearty as possible, so that it was like a
glass of something hot, ‘What accident have you met with? You have
been badly hurt. What’s amiss, old boy? Cheer up,
and tell us about it!’ Cheer up! I was cheered already! I says
as much to you, you says more to me, I says more to you, you says
more to me, and here I am, commander! Here I am, commander!”
cries Phil, who has started from his chair and unaccountably begun
to sidle away. “If a mark’s wanted, or if it will improve the business,
let the customers take aim at me. They can’t spoil my beauty. I’m all
right. Come on! If they want a man to box at, let ‘em box at me. Let
‘em knock me well about the head. I don’t mind. If they want a
light-weight to be throwed for practice, Cornwall, Devonshire, or
Lancashire, let ‘em throw me. They won’t hurt me. I have been
throwed, all sorts of styles, all my life!”
With this unexpected speech, energetically delivered and
accompanied by action illustrative of the various exercises referred
to, Phil Squod shoulders his way round three sides of the gallery, and
abruptly tacking off at his commander, makes a butt at him with his
head, intended to express devotion to his service. He then begins to
clear away the breakfast.
Mr. George, after laughing cheerfully and clapping him on the
shoulder, assists in these arrangements and helps to get the gallery
into business order. That done, he takes a turn at the dumb-bells,
and afterwards weighing himself and opining that he is getting “too
fleshy,” engages with great gravity in solitary broadsword practice.
Meanwhile Phil has fallen to work at his usual table, where he screws
and unscrews, and cleans, and files, and whistles into small apertures,
and blackens himself more and more, and seems to do and undo
everything that can be done and undone about a gun.
Master and man are at length disturbed by footsteps in the pas-
sage, where they make an unusual sound, denoting the arrival of
unusual company. These steps, advancing nearer and nearer to the
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able terror and a half-subdued “O Lord! Oh, dear me!” Nor in his
apprehension, on the surface of things, without some reason, for
Phil, who has never beheld the apparition in the black-velvet cap
before, has stopped short with a gun in his hand with much of the air
of a dead shot intent on picking Mr. Smallweed off as an ugly old
bird of the crow species.
“Judy, my child,” says Grandfather Smallweed, “give the person
his twopence. It’s a great deal for what he has done.”
The person, who is one of those extraordinary specimens of hu-
man fungus that spring up spontaneously in the western streets of
London, ready dressed in an old red jacket, with a “mission” for hold-
ing horses and calling coaches, received his twopence with anything
but transport, tosses the money into the air, catches it over-handed,
and retires.
“My dear Mr. George,” says Grandfather Smallweed, “would you
be so kind as help to carry me to the fire? I am accustomed to a fire,
and I am an old man, and I soon chill. Oh, dear me!”
His closing exclamation is jerked out of the venerable gentleman
by the suddenness with which Mr. Squod, like a genie, catches him
up, chair and all, and deposits him on the hearth-stone.
“O Lord!” says Mr. Smallweed, panting. “Oh, dear me! Oh, my
stars! My dear friend, your workman is very strong—and very prompt.
O Lord, he is very prompt! Judy, draw me back a little. I’m being
scorched in the legs,” which indeed is testified to the noses of all
present by the smell of his worsted stockings.
The gentle Judy, having backed her grandfather a little way from
the fire, and having shaken him up as usual, and having released his
overshadowed eye from its black-velvet extinguisher, Mr. Smallweed
again says, “Oh, dear me! O Lord!” and looking about and meeting
Mr. George’s glance, again stretches out both hands.
“My dear friend! So happy in this meeting! And this is your estab-
lishment? It’s a delightful place. It’s a picture! You
never find that anything goes off here accidentally, do you, my dear
friend?” adds Grandfather Smallweed, very ill at ease.
“No, no. No fear of that.”
“And your workman. He—Oh, dear me!—he never lets anything
off without meaning it, does he, my dear friend?”
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“He has never hurt anybody but himself,” says Mr. George, smiling.
“But he might, you know. He seems to have hurt himself a good
deal, and he might hurt somebody else,” the old gentleman returns.
“He mightn’t mean it—or he even might. Mr. George, will you or-
der him to leave his infernal firearms alone and go away?”
Obedient to a nod from the trooper, Phil retires, empty-handed,
to the other end of the gallery. Mr. Smallweed, reassured, falls to
rubbing his legs.
“And you’re doing well, Mr. George?” he says to the trooper,
squarely standing faced about towards him with his broadsword in
his hand. “You are prospering, please the Powers?”
Mr. George answers with a cool nod, adding, “Go on. You have
not come to say that, I know.”
“You are so sprightly, Mr. George,” returns the venerable
grandfather. “You are such good company.”
“Ha ha! Go on!” says Mr. George.
“My dear friend! But that sword looks awful gleaming and sharp. It
might cut somebody, by accident. It makes me shiver, Mr. George.
Curse him!” says the excellent old gentleman apart to Judy as the trooper
takes a step or two away to lay it aside. “He owes me money, and
might think of paying off old scores in this murdering place. I wish
your brimstone grandmother was here, and he’d shave her head off.”
Mr. George, returning, folds his arms, and looking down at the
old man, sliding every moment lower and lower in his chair, says
quietly, “Now for it!”
“Ho!” cries Mr. Smallweed, rubbing his hands with an artful
chuckle. “Yes. Now for it. Now for what, my dear friend?”
“For a pipe,” says Mr. George, who with great composure sets his
chair in the chimney-corner, takes his pipe from the grate, fills it and
lights it, and falls to smoking peacefully.
This tends to the discomfiture of Mr. Smallweed, who finds it so
difficult to resume his object, whatever it may be, that he becomes
exasperated and secretly claws the air with an impotent vindictive-
ness expressive of an intense desire to tear and rend the visage of Mr.
George. As the excellent old gentleman’s nails are long and leaden,
and his hands lean and veinous, and his eyes green and watery; and,
over and above this, as he continues, while he claws, to slide down in
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“My friend in the city, Mr. George, has done a little business with
a pupil of yours.”
“Has he?” says Mr. George. “I am sorry to hear it.”
“Yes, sir.” Grandfather Smallweed rubs his legs. “He is a fine young
soldier now, Mr. George, by the name of Carstone. Friends came
forward and paid it all up, honourable.”
“Did they?” returns Mr. George. “Do you think your friend in the
city would like a piece of advice?”
“I think he would, my dear friend. From you.”
“I advise him, then, to do no more business in that quarter. There’s
no more to be got by it. The young gentleman, to my knowledge, is
brought to a dead halt.”
“No, no, my dear friend. No, no, Mr. George. No, no, no, sir,”
remonstrates Grandfather Smallweed, cunningly rubbing his spare
legs. “Not quite a dead halt, I think. He has good friends, and he is
good for his pay, and he is good for the selling price of his commis-
sion, and he is good for his chance in a lawsuit, and he is good for his
chance in a wife, and—oh, do you know, Mr. George, I think my
friend would consider the young gentleman good for something yet?”
says Grandfather Smallweed, turning up his velvet cap and scratch-
ing his ear like a monkey.
Mr. George, who has put aside his pipe and sits with an arm on his
chair-back, beats a tattoo on the ground with his right foot as if he
were not particularly pleased with the turn the conversation has taken.
“But to pass from one subject to another,” resumes Mr. Smallweed.
“‘To promote the conversation, as a joker might say. To pass, Mr.
George, from the ensign to the captain.”
“What are you up to, now?” asks Mr. George, pausing with a frown
in stroking the recollection of his moustache. “What captain?”
“Our captain. The captain we know of. Captain Hawdon.”
“Oh! That’s it, is it?” says Mr. George with a low whistle as he sees
both grandfather and granddaughter looking hard at him. “You are there!
Well? What about it? Come, I won’t be smothered any more. Speak!”
“My dear friend,” returns the old man, “I was applied—Judy, shake
me up a little!—I was applied to yesterday about the captain, and my
opinion still is that the captain is not dead.”
“Bosh!” observes Mr. George.
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“What was your remark, my dear friend?” inquires the old man
with his hand to his ear.
“Bosh!”
“Ho!” says Grandfather Smallweed. “Mr. George, of my opinion
you can judge for yourself according to the questions asked of me
and the reasons given for asking ‘em. Now, what do you think the
lawyer making the inquiries wants?”
“A job,” says Mr. George.
“Nothing of the kind!”
“Can’t be a lawyer, then,” says Mr. George, folding his arms with
an air of confirmed resolution.
“My dear friend, he is a lawyer, and a famous one. He wants to see
some fragment in Captain Hawdon’s writing. He don’t want to keep
it. He only wants to see it and compare it with a writing in his pos-
session.”
“Well?”
“Well, Mr. George. Happening to remember the advertisement
concerning Captain Hawdon and any information that could be given
respecting him, he looked it up and came to me—just as you did,
my dear friend. Will you shake hands? So glad you came that day! I
should have missed forming such a friendship if you hadn’t come!”
“Well, Mr. Smallweed?” says Mr. George again after going through
the ceremony with some stiffness.
“I had no such thing. I have nothing but his signature. Plague
pestilence and famine, battle murder and sudden death upon him,”
says the old man, making a curse out of one of his few remem-
brances of a prayer and squeezing up his velvet cap between his angry
hands, “I have half a million of his signatures, I think! But you,”
breathlessly recovering his mildness of speech as Judy re-adjusts the
cap on his skittle-ball of a head, “you, my dear Mr. George, are likely
to have some letter or paper that would suit the purpose. Anything
would suit the purpose, written in the hand.”
“Some writing in that hand,” says the trooper, pondering; “may
be, I have.”
“My dearest friend!”
“May be, I have not.”
“Ho!” says Grandfather Smallweed, crest-fallen.
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Phil makes no reply, but seizing the chair and its load, sidles away,
tightly bugged by the now speechless Mr. Smallweed, and bolts along
the passage as if he had an acceptable commission to carry the old
gentleman to the nearest volcano. His shorter trust, however, termi-
nating at the cab, he deposits him there; and the fair Judy takes her
place beside him, and the chair embellishes the roof, and Mr. George
takes the vacant place upon the box.
Mr. George is quite confounded by the spectacle he beholds from
time to time as he peeps into the cab through the window behind
him, where the grim Judy is always motionless, and the old gentle-
man with his cap over one eye is always sliding off the seat into the
straw and looking upward at him out of his other eye with a helpless
expression of being jolted in the back.
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CHAPTER XXVII
MR. GEORGE HAS NOT FAR to ride with folded arms upon the box, for
their destination is Lincoln’s Inn Fields. When the driver stops his horses,
Mr. George alights, and looking in at the window, says, “What, Mr.
Tulkinghorn’s your man, is he?”
“Yes, my dear friend. Do you know him, Mr. George?”
“Why, I have heard of him—seen him too, I think. But I don’t
know him, and he don’t know me.”
There ensues the carrying of Mr. Smallweed upstairs, which is done
to perfection with the trooper’s help. He is borne into Mr. Tulkinghorn’s
great room and deposited on the Turkey rug before the fire. Mr.
Tulkinghorn is not within at the present moment but will be back
directly. The occupant of the pew in the hall, having said thus much,
stirs the fire and leaves the triumvirate to warm themselves.
Mr. George is mightily curious in respect of the room. He looks up
at the painted ceiling, looks round at the old law-books, contemplates
the portraits of the great clients, reads aloud the names on the boxes.
“‘Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet,’” Mr. George reads thoughtfully.
“Ha! ‘Manor of Chesney Wold.’ Humph!” Mr. George stands look-
ing at these boxes a long while—as if they were pictures—and comes
back to the fire repeating, “Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, and Manor
of Chesney Wold, hey?”
“Worth a mint of money, Mr. George!” whispers Grandfather
Smallweed, rubbing his legs. “Powerfully rich!”
“Who do you mean? This old gentleman, or the Baronet?”
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self, please yourself.” “If you know what you mean, that’s quite enough.”
These he utters with an appearance of perfect indifference as he looks
over the papers on his table and prepares to write a letter.
Mr. George looks distrustfully from the painted ceiling to the
ground, from the ground to Mr. Smallweed, from Mr. Smallweed
to Mr. Tulkinghorn, and from Mr. Tulkinghorn to the painted ceil-
ing again, often in his perplexity changing the leg on which he rests.
“I do assure you, sir,” says Mr. George, “not to say it offensively,
that between you and Mr. Smallweed here, I really am being smoth-
ered fifty times over. I really am, sir. I am not a match for you gentle-
men. Will you allow me to ask why you want to see the captain’s
hand, in the case that I could find any specimen of it?”
Mr. Tulkinghorn quietly shakes his head. “No. If you were a man
of business, sergeant, you would not need to be informed that there
are confidential reasons, very harmless in themselves, for many such
wants in the profession to which I belong. But if you are afraid of
doing any injury to Captain Hawdon, you may set your mind at rest
about that.”
“Aye! He is dead, sir.”
“Is he?” Mr. Tulkinghorn quietly sits down to write.
“Well, sir,” says the trooper, looking into his hat after another dis-
concerted pause, “I am sorry not to have given you more satisfaction.
If it would be any satisfaction to any one that I should be confirmed
in my judgment that I would rather have nothing to do with this by
a friend of mine who has a better head for business than I have, and
who is an old soldier, I am willing to consult with him. I—I really
am so completely smothered myself at present,” says Mr. George,
passing his hand hopelessly across his brow, “that I don’t know but
what it might be a satisfaction to me.”
Mr. Smallweed, hearing that this authority is an old soldier, so
strongly inculcates the expediency of the trooper’s taking counsel
with him, and particularly informing him of its being a question of
five guineas or more, that Mr. George engages to go and see him.
Mr. Tulkinghorn says nothing either way.
“I’ll consult my friend, then, by your leave, sir,” says the trooper,
“and I’ll take the liberty of looking in again with the
final answer in the course of the day. Mr. Smallweed, if you wish to
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be carried downstairs—”
“In a moment, my dear friend, in a moment. Will you first let me
speak half a word with this gentleman in private?”
“Certainly, sir. Don’t hurry yourself on my account.” The trooper
retires to a distant part of the room and resumes his curious inspec-
tion of the boxes, strong and otherwise.
“If I wasn’t as weak as a brimstone baby, sir,” whispers Grandfather
Smallweed, drawing the lawyer down to his level by the lapel of his
coat and flashing some half-quenched green fire out of his angry
eyes, “I’d tear the writing away from him. He’s got it buttoned in his
breast. I saw him put it there. Judy saw him put it there. Speak up,
you crabbed image for the sign of a walking-stick shop, and say you
saw him put it there!”
This vehement conjuration the old gentleman accompanies with
such a thrust at his granddaughter that it is too much for his strength,
and he slips away out of his chair, drawing Mr. Tulkinghorn with
him, until he is arrested by Judy, and well shaken.
“Violence will not do for me, my friend,” Mr. Tulkinghorn then
remarks coolly.
“No, no, I know, I know, sir. But it’s chafing and galling—it’s—
it’s worse than your smattering chattering magpie of a grandmother,”
to the imperturbable Judy, who only looks at the fire, “to know he
has got what’s wanted and won’t give it up. He, not to give it up! He!
A vagabond! But never mind, sir, never mind. At the most, he has
only his own way for a little while. I have him periodically in a vice.
I’ll twist him, sir. I’ll screw him, sir. If he won’t do it with a good
grace, I’ll make him do it with a bad one, sir! Now, my dear Mr.
George,” says Grandfather Smallweed, winking at the lawyer hid-
eously as he releases him, “I am ready for your kind assistance, my
excellent friend!”
Mr. Tulkinghorn, with some shadowy sign of amusement mani-
festing itself through his self-possession, stands on the hearth-rug
with his back to the fire, watching the disappearance of Mr. Smallweed
and acknowledging the trooper’s parting salute with one slight nod.
It is more difficult to get rid of the old gentleman, Mr. George
finds, than to bear a hand in carrying him downstairs, for when he is
replaced in his conveyance, he is so loquacious on the subject of the
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his friend shall not partake of his counsel without first partaking of
boiled pork and greens. The trooper yielding to this invitation, he and
Mr. Bagnet, not to embarrass the domestic preparations, go forth to
take a turn up and down the little street, which they promenade with
measured tread and folded arms, as if it were a rampart.
“George,” says Mr. Bagnet. “You know me. It’s my old girl that
advises. She has the head. But I never own to it before her. Discipline
must be maintained. Wait till the greens is off her mind. Then we’ll
consult. Whatever the old girl says, do—do it!”
“I intend to, Mat,” replies the other. “I would sooner take her
opinion than that of a college.”
“College,” returns Mr. Bagnet in short sentences, bassoon-like.
“What college could you leave—in another quarter of the world—
with nothing but a grey cloak and an umbrella—to make its way
home to Europe? The old girl would do it to-morrow. Did it once!”
“You are right,” says Mr. George.
“What college,” pursues Bagnet, “could you set up in life—with
two penn’orth of white lime—a penn’orth of fuller’s earth—a ha’porth
of sand—and the rest of the change out of sixpence in money? That’s
what the old girl started on. In the present business.”
“I am rejoiced to hear it’s thriving, Mat.”
“The old girl,” says Mr. Bagnet, acquiescing, “saves. Has a stock-
ing somewhere. With money in it. I never saw it. But I know she’s
got it. Wait till the greens is off her mind. Then she’ll set you up.”
“She is a treasure!” exclaims Mr. George.
“She’s more. But I never own to it before her. Discipline must be
maintained. It was the old girl that brought out my musical abilities.
I should have been in the artillery now but for the old girl. Six years
I hammered at the fiddle. Ten at the flute. The old girl said it wouldn’t
do; intention good, but want of flexibility; try the bassoon. The old
girl borrowed a bassoon from the bandmaster of the Rifle Regiment.
I practised in the trenches. Got on, got another, get a living by it!”
George remarks that she looks as fresh as a rose and as sound as an
apple.
“The old girl,” says Mr. Bagnet in reply, “is a thoroughly fine
woman. Consequently she is like a thoroughly fine day. Gets finer as
she gets on. I never saw the old girl’s equal. But I never own to it
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CHAPTER XXVIII
The Ironmaster
SIR LEICESTER DEDLOCK HAS GOT the better, for the time being, of the
family gout and is once more, in a literal no less than in a figurative
point of view, upon his legs. He is at his place in Lincolnshire; but
the waters are out again on the low-lying grounds, and the cold and
damp steal into Chesney Wold, though well defended, and eke into
Sir Leicester’s bones. The blazing fires of faggot and coal—Dedlock
timber and antediluvian forest—that blaze upon the broad wide
hearths and wink in the twilight on the frowning woods, sullen to
see how trees are sacrificed, do not exclude the enemy. The hot-water
pipes that trail themselves all over the house, the cushioned doors
and windows, and the screens and curtains fail to supply the fires’
deficiencies and to satisfy Sir Leicester’s need. Hence the fashionable
intelligence proclaims one morning to the listening earth that Lady
Dedlock is expected shortly to return to town for a few weeks.
It is a melancholy truth that even great men have their poor rela-
tions. Indeed great men have often more than their fair share of poor
relations, inasmuch as very red blood of the superior quality, like
inferior blood unlawfully shed, will cry aloud and will be heard. Sir
Leicester’s cousins, in the remotest degree, are so many murders in
the respect that they “will out.” Among whom there are cousins who
are so poor that one might almost dare to think it would have been
the happier for them never to have been plated links upon the Dedlock
chain of gold, but to have been made of common iron at first and
done base service.
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bristle on the distant table by the door, and cousins yawn on otto-
mans. Cousins at the piano, cousins at the soda-water tray, cousins
rising from the card-table, cousins gathered round the fire. Standing
on one side of his own peculiar fire (for there are two), Sir Leicester.
On the opposite side of the broad hearth, my Lady at her table.
Volumnia, as one of the more privileged cousins, in a luxurious chair
between them. Sir Leicester glancing, with magnificent displeasure, at
the rouge and the pearl necklace.
“I occasionally meet on my staircase here,” drawls Volumnia, whose
thoughts perhaps are already hopping up it to bed, after a long evening
of very desultory talk, “one of the prettiest girls, I think, that I ever
saw in my life.”
“A protegee of my Lady’s,” observes Sir Leicester.
“I thought so. I felt sure that some uncommon eye must have
picked that girl out. She really is a marvel. A dolly sort of beauty
perhaps,” says Miss Volumnia, reserving her own sort, “but in its
way, perfect; such bloom I never saw!”
Sir Leicester, with his magnificent glance of displeasure at the rouge,
appears to say so too.
“Indeed,” remarks my Lady languidly, “if there is any uncommon
eye in the case, it is Mrs. Rouncewell’s, and not mine. Rosa is her
discovery.”
“Your maid, I suppose?”
“No. My anything; pet—secretary—messenger—I don’t know
what.”
“You like to have her about you, as you would like to have a
flower, or a bird, or a picture, or a poodle—no, not a poodle,
though—or anything else that was equally pretty?” says Volumnia,
sympathizing. “Yes, how charming now! And how well that de-
lightful old soul Mrs. Rouncewell is looking. She must be an im-
mense age, and yet she is as active and handsome! She is the dearest
friend I have, positively!”
Sir Leicester feels it to be right and fitting that the housekeeper of
Chesney Wold should be a remarkable person. Apart from that, he
has a real regard for Mrs. Rouncewell and likes to hear her praised. So
he says, “You are right, Volumnia,” which Volumnia is extremely
glad to hear.
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CHAPTER XXIX
CHESNEY WOLD IS SHUT UP, carpets are rolled into great scrolls in cor-
ners of comfortless rooms, bright damask does penance in brown
holland, carving and gilding puts on mortification, and the Dedlock
ancestors retire from the light of day again. Around and around the
house the leaves fall thick, but never fast, for they come circling down
with a dead lightness that is sombre and slow. Let the gardener sweep
and sweep the turf as he will, and press the leaves into full barrows, and
wheel them off, still they lie ankle-deep. Howls the shrill wind round
Chesney Wold; the sharp rain beats, the windows rattle, and the chim-
neys growl. Mists hide in the avenues, veil the points of view, and
move in funeral-wise across the rising grounds. On all the house there
is a cold, blank smell like the smell of a little church, though some-
thing dryer, suggesting that the dead and buried Dedlocks walk there
in the long nights and leave the flavour of their graves behind them.
But the house in town, which is rarely in the same mind as Chesney
Wold at the same time, seldom rejoicing when it rejoices or mourn-
ing when it mourns, expecting when a Dedlock dies—the house in
town shines out awakened. As warm and bright as so much state
may be, as delicately redolent of pleasant scents that bear no trace of
winter as hothouse flowers can make it, soft and hushed so that the
ticking of the clocks and the crisp burning of the fires alone disturb
the stillness in the rooms, it seems to wrap those chilled bones of Sir
Leicester’s in rainbow-coloured wool. And Sir Leicester is glad to
repose in dignified contentment before the great fire in the library,
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“My God!”
Mr. Guppy stares. Lady Dedlock sits before him looking him
through, with the same dark shade upon her face, in the same atti-
tude even to the holding of the screen, with her lips a little apart, her
brow a little contracted, but for the moment dead. He sees her con-
sciousness return, sees a tremor pass across her frame like a ripple
over water, sees her lips shake, sees her compose them by a great
effort, sees her force herself back to the knowledge of his presence
and of what he has said. All this, so quickly, that her exclamation and
her dead condition seem to have passed away like the features of
those long-preserved dead bodies sometimes opened up in tombs,
which, struck by the air like lightning, vanish in a breath.
“Your ladyship is acquainted with the name of Hawdon?”
“I have heard it before.”
“Name of any collateral or remote branch of your ladyship’s family?”
“No.”
“Now, your ladyship,” says Mr. Guppy, “I come to the last point of
the case, so far as I have got it up. It’s going on, and I shall gather it up
closer and closer as it goes on. Your ladyship must know—if your
ladyship don’t happen, by any chance, to know already—that there
was found dead at the house of a person named Krook, near Chancery
Lane, some time ago, a law-writer in great distress. Upon which law-
writer there was an inquest, and which law-writer was an anonymous
character, his name being unknown. But, your ladyship, I have discov-
ered very lately that that law-writer’s name was Hawdon.”
“And what is that to me?”
“Aye, your ladyship, that’s the question! Now, your ladyship, a
queer thing happened after that man’s death. A lady started up, a
disguised lady, your ladyship, who went to look at the scene of ac-
tion and went to look at his grave. She hired a crossing-sweeping boy
to show it her. If your ladyship would wish to have the boy pro-
duced in corroboration of this statement, I can lay my hand upon
him at any time.”
The wretched boy is nothing to my Lady, and she does not wish to
have him produced.
“Oh, I assure your ladyship it’s a very queer start indeed,” says Mr.
Guppy. “If you was to hear him tell about the rings that sparkled on
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her fingers when she took her glove off, you’d think it quite romantic.”
There are diamonds glittering on the hand that holds the screen.
My Lady trifles with the screen and makes them glitter more, again
with that expression which in other times might have been so dan-
gerous to the young man of the name of Guppy.
“It was supposed, your ladyship, that he left no rag or scrap behind
him by which he could be possibly identified. But he did. He left a
bundle of old letters.”
The screen still goes, as before. All this time her eyes never
once release him.
“They were taken and secreted. And to-morrow night, your lady-
ship, they will come into my possession.”
“Still I ask you, what is this to me?”
“Your ladyship, I conclude with that.” Mr. Guppy rises. “If you
think there’s enough in this chain of circumstances put together—in
the undoubted strong likeness of this young lady to your ladyship,
which is a positive fact for a jury; in her having been brought up by
Miss Barbary; in Miss Barbary stating Miss Summerson’s real name
to be Hawdon; in your ladyship’s knowing both these names very
well; and in Hawdon’s dying as he did—to give your ladyship a fam-
ily interest in going further into the case, I will bring these papers
here. I don’t know what they are, except that they are old letters: I
have never had them in my posession yet. I will bring those papers
here as soon as I get them and go over them for the first time with
your ladyship. I have told your
ladyship my object. I have told your ladyship that I should be placed
in a very disagreeable situation if any complaint was made, and all is
in strict confidence.”
Is this the full purpose of the young man of the name of Guppy,
or has he any other? Do his words disclose the length, breadth, depth,
of his object and suspicion in coming here; or if not, what do they
hide? He is a match for my Lady there. She may look at him, but he
can look at the table and keep that witness-box face of his from
telling anything.
“You may bring the letters,” says my Lady, “if you choose.”
“Your ladyship is not very encouraging, upon my word and
honour,” says Mr. Guppy, a little injured.
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“You may bring the letters,” she repeats in the same tone, “if you—
please.”
“It shall he done. I wish your ladyship good day.”
On a table near her is a rich bauble of a casket, barred and
clasped like an old strong-chest. She, looking at him still, takes it to
her and unlocks it.
“Oh! I assure your ladyship I am not actuated by any motives of
that sort,” says Mr. Guppy, “and I couldn’t accept anything of the
kind. I wish your ladyship good day, and am much obliged to you all
the same.”
So the young man makes his bow and goes downstairs, where the
supercilious Mercury does not consider himself called upon to leave
his Olympus by the hall-fire to let the young man out.
As Sir Leicester basks in his library and dozes over his newspaper, is
there no influence in the house to startle him, not to say to make the
very trees at Chesney Wold fling up their knotted arms, the very por-
traits frown, the very armour stir?
No. Words, sobs, and cries are but air, and air is so shut in and shut out
throughout the house in town that sounds need be uttered trumpet-tongued
indeed by my Lady in her chamber to carry any faint vibration to Sir
Leicester’s ears; and yet this cry is in the house, going upward from a wild
figure on its knees.
“O my child, my child! Not dead in the first hours of her life, as
my cruel sister told me, but sternly nurtured by her, after she had
renounced me and my name! O my child, O my child!”
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CHAPTER XXX
Esther’s Narrative
RICHARD HAD BEEN GONE AWAY some time when a visitor came to pass
a few days with us. It was an elderly lady. It was Mrs. Woodcourt,
who, having come from Wales to stay with Mrs. Bayham Badger
and having written to my guardian, “by her son Allan’s desire,” to
report that she had heard from him and that he was well “and sent his
kind remembrances to all of us,” had been invited by my guardian to
make a visit to Bleak House. She stayed with us nearly three weeks.
She took very kindly to me and was extremely confidential, so much
so that sometimes she almost made me uncomfortable. I had no
right, I knew very well, to be uncomfortable because she confided in
me, and I felt it was unreasonable; still, with all I could do, I could
not quite help it.
She was such a sharp little lady and used to sit with her hands
folded in each other looking so very watchful while she talked to me
that perhaps I found that rather irksome. Or perhaps it was her being
so upright and trim, though I don’t think it was that, because I
thought that quaintly pleasant. Nor can it have been the general ex-
pression of her face, which was very sparkling and pretty for an old
lady. I don’t know what it was. Or at least if I do now, I thought I
did not then. Or at least—but it don’t matter.
Of a night when I was going upstairs to bed, she would invite me
into her room, where she sat before the fire in a great chair; and, dear
me, she would tell me about Morgan ap-Kerrig until I was quite
low-spirited! Sometimes she recited a few verses from
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least as well as to anybody else, and not trouble myself about the
harmless things she said to me? Impelled towards her, as I certainly
was, for I was very anxious that she should like me and was very glad
indeed that she did, why should I harp afterwards, with actual dis-
tress and pain, on every word she said and weigh it over and over
again in twenty scales? Why was it so worrying to me to have her in
our house, and confidential to me every night, when I yet felt that it
was better and safer somehow that she should be there than any-
where else? These were perplexities and contradictions that I could
not account for. At least, if I could—but I shall come to all that by
and by, and it is mere idleness to go on about it now.
So when Mrs. Woodcourt went away, I was sorry to lose her but
was relieved too. And then Caddy Jellyby came down, and Caddy
brought such a packet of domestic news that it gave us abundant
occupation.
First Caddy declared (and would at first declare nothing else) that
I was the best adviser that ever was known. This, my pet said, was no
news at all; and this, I said, of course, was nonsense. Then Caddy
told us that she was going to be married in a month and that if Ada
and I would be her bridesmaids, she was the happiest girl in the
world. To be sure, this was news indeed; and I thought we never
should have done talking about it, we had so much to say to Caddy,
and Caddy had so much to say to us.
It seemed that Caddy’s unfortunate papa had got over his bank-
ruptcy—”gone through the Gazette,” was the expression Caddy used,
as if it were a tunnel—with the general clemency and commiseration
of his creditors, and had got rid of his affairs in some blessed manner
without succeeding in understanding them, and had given up every-
thing he possessed (which was not worth much, I should think, to
judge from the state of the furniture), and had satisfied every one
concerned that he could do no more, poor man. So, he had been
honourably dismissed to “the office” to begin the world again. What
he did at the office, I never knew; Caddy said he was a “custom-
house and general agent,” and the only thing I ever understood about
that business was that when he wanted money more than usual he
went to the docks to look for it, and hardly ever found it.
As soon as her papa had tranquillized his mind by becoming this
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She was clumsy enough with her needle, poor girl, and pricked her
fingers as much as she had been used to ink them. She could not help
reddening a little now and then, partly with the smart and partly
with vexation at being able to do no better, but she soon got over
that and began to improve rapidly. So day after day she, and my
darling, and my little maid Charley, and a milliner out of the town,
and I, sat hard at work, as pleasantly as possible.
Over and above this, Caddy was very anxious “to learn housekeep-
ing,” as she said. Now, mercy upon us! The idea of her learning house-
keeping of a person of my vast experience was such a joke that I
laughed, and coloured up, and fell into a comical confusion when
she proposed it. However, I said, “Caddy, I am sure you are very
welcome to learn anything that you can learn of me, my dear,” and I
showed her all my books and methods and all my fidgety ways. You
would have supposed that I was showing her some wonderful inven-
tions, by her study of them; and if you had seen her, whenever I
jingled my housekeeping keys, get up and attend me, certainly you
might have thought that there never was a greater imposter than I
with a blinder follower than Caddy Jellyby.
So what with working and housekeeping, and lessons to Charley,
and backgammon in the evening with my guardian, and duets with
Ada, the three weeks slipped fast away. Then I went home with Caddy
to see what could be done there, and Ada and Charley remained
behind to take care of my guardian.
When I say I went home with Caddy, I mean to the furnished
lodging in Hatton Garden. We went to Newman Street two or three
times, where preparations were in progress too—a good many, I ob-
served, for enhancing the comforts of old Mr. Turveydrop, and a few
for putting the newly married couple away cheaply at the top of the
house—but our great point was to make the furnished lodging de-
cent for the wedding-breakfast and to imbue Mrs. Jellyby before-
hand with some faint sense of the occasion.
The latter was the more difficult thing of the two because Mrs.
Jellyby and an unwholesome boy occupied the front sitting-room
(the back one was a mere closet), and it was littered down with waste-
paper and Borrioboolan documents, as an untidy stable might be
littered with straw. Mrs. Jellyby sat there all day drinking strong
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my dear Miss Summerson,” said Mrs. Jellyby, “you know best, I dare
say. But by obliging me to employ a boy, Caddy has embarrassed me
to that extent, overwhelmed as I am with public business, that I don’t
know which way to turn. We have a Ramification meeting, too, on
Wednesday afternoon, and the inconvenience is very serious.”
“It is not likely to occur again,” said I, smiling. “Caddy will be
married but once, probably.”
“That’s true,” Mrs. Jellyby replied; “that’s true, my dear. I
suppose we must make the best of it!”
The next question was how Mrs. Jellyby should be dressed on the
occasion. I thought it very curious to see her looking on serenely
from her writing-table while Caddy and I discussed it, occasionally
shaking her head at us with a half-reproachful smile like a superior
spirit who could just bear with our trifling.
The state in which her dresses were, and the extraordinary confu-
sion in which she kept them, added not a little to our difficulty; but
at length we devised something not very unlike what a common-
place mother might wear on such an occasion. The abstracted man-
ner in which Mrs. Jellyby would deliver herself up to having this
attire tried on by the dressmaker, and the sweetness with which she
would then observe to me how sorry she was that I had not turned
my thoughts to Africa, were consistent with the rest of her behaviour.
The lodging was rather confined as to space, but I fancied that if
Mrs. Jellyby’s household had been the only lodgers in Saint Paul’s or
Saint Peter’s, the sole advantage they would have found in the size of
the building would have been its affording a great deal of room to be
dirty in. I believe that nothing belonging to the family which it had
been possible to break was unbroken at the time of those prepara-
tions for Caddy’s marriage, that nothing which it had been possible
to spoil in any way was unspoilt, and that no domestic object which
was capable of collecting dirt, from a dear child’s knee to the door-
plate, was without as much dirt as could well accumulate upon it.
Poor Mr. Jellyby, who very seldom spoke and almost always sat
when he was at home with his head against the wall, became interested
when he saw that Caddy and I were attempting to establish some order
among all this waste and ruin and took off his coat to help. But such
wonderful things came tumbling out of the closets when they were
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asked Caddy, coaxing him, with her arms round his neck.
“Never have a mission, my dear child.”
Mr. Jellyby groaned and laid his head against the wall again, and this was
the only time I ever heard him make any approach to expressing his senti-
ments on the Borrioboolan question. I suppose he had been more talk-
ative and lively once, but he seemed to have been completely exhausted
long before I knew him.
I thought Mrs. Jellyby never would have left off serenely looking
over her papers and drinking coffee that night. It was twelve o’clock
before we could obtain possession of the room, and the clearance it
required then was so discouraging that Caddy, who was almost tired
out, sat down in the middle of the dust and cried. But she soon
cheered up, and we did wonders with it before we went to bed.
In the morning it looked, by the aid of a few flowers and a quan-
tity of soap and water and a little arrangement, quite gay. The plain
breakfast made a cheerful show, and Caddy was perfectly charming.
But when my darling came, I thought—and I think now—that I
never had seen such a dear face as my beautiful pet’s.
We made a little feast for the children upstairs, and we put Peepy
at the head of the table, and we showed them Caddy in her bridal
dress, and they clapped their hands and hurrahed, and Caddy cried to
think that she was going away from them and hugged them over and
over again until we brought Prince up to fetch her away—when, I
am sorry to say, Peepy bit him. Then there was old Mr. Turveydrop
downstairs, in a state of deportment not to be expressed, benignly
blessing Caddy and giving my guardian to understand that his son’s
happiness was his own parental work and that he sacrificed personal
considerations to ensure it. “My dear sir,” said Mr. Turveydrop, “these
young people will live with me; my house is large enough for their
accommodation, and they shall not want the shelter of my roof. I
could have wished—you will understand the allusion, Mr. Jarndyce,
for you remember my illustrious patron the Prince Regent—I could
have wished that my son had married into a family where there was
more deportment, but the will of heaven be done!”
Mr. and Mrs. Pardiggle were of the party—Mr. Pardiggle, an ob-
stinate-looking man with a large waistcoat and stubbly hair, who was
always talking in a loud bass voice about his mite, or Mrs. Pardiggle’s
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mite, or their five boys’ mites. Mr. Quale, with his hair brushed back
as usual and his knobs of temples shining very much, was also there,
not in the character of a disappointed lover, but as the accepted of a
young—at least, an unmarried—lady, a Miss Wisk, who was also
there. Miss Wisk’s mission, my guardian said, was to show the world
that woman’s mission was man’s mission and that the only genuine
mission of both man and woman was to be
always moving declaratory resolutions about things in general at public
meetings. The guests were few, but were, as one might expect at Mrs.
Jellyby’s, all devoted to public objects only. Besides those I have
mentioned, there was an extremely dirty lady with her bonnet all
awry and the ticketed price of her dress still sticking on it, whose
neglected home, Caddy told me, was like a filthy wilderness, but
whose church was like a fancy fair. A very contentious gentleman,
who said it was his mission to be everybody’s brother but who ap-
peared to be on terms of coolness with the whole of his large family,
completed the party.
A party, having less in common with such an occasion, could hardly
have been got together by any ingenuity. Such a mean mission as the
domestic mission was the very last thing to be endured among them;
indeed, Miss Wisk informed us, with great indignation, before we sat
down to breakfast, that the idea of woman’s mission lying chiefly in the
narrow sphere of home was an outrageous slander on the part of her
tyrant, man. One other singularity was that nobody with a mission—
except Mr. Quale, whose mission, as I think I have formerly said, was to
be in ecstasies with everybody’s mission—cared at all for anybody’s mis-
sion. Mrs. Pardiggle being as clear that the only one infallible course was
her course of pouncing upon the poor and applying benevolence to them
like a strait-waistcoat; as Miss Wisk was that the only practical thing for
the world was the emancipation of woman from the thraldom of her
tyrant, man. Mrs. Jellyby, all the while, sat smiling at the limited vision
that could see anything but Borrioboola-Gha.
But I am anticipating now the purport of our conversation on the
ride home instead of first marrying Caddy. We all went to church,
and Mr. Jellyby gave her away. Of the air with which old Mr.
Turveydrop, with his hat under his left arm (the inside presented at
the clergyman like a cannon) and his eyes creasing themselves up into
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CHAPTER XXXI
I HAD NOT BEEN AT HOME again many days when one evening I went
upstairs into my own room to take a peep over Charley’s shoulder
and see how she was getting on with her copy-book. Writing was a
trying business to Charley, who seemed to have no natural power
over a pen, but in whose hand every pen appeared to become per-
versely animated, and to go wrong and crooked, and to stop, and
splash, and sidle into corners like a saddle-donkey. It was very odd to
see what old letters Charley’s young hand had made, they so wrinkled,
and shrivelled, and tottering, it so plump and round. Yet Charley
was uncommonly expert at other things and had as nimble little
fingers as I ever watched.
“Well, Charley,” said I, looking over a copy of the letter O in
which it was represented as square, triangular, pear-shaped, and col-
lapsed in all kinds of ways, “we are improving. If we only get to
make it round, we shall be perfect, Charley.”
Then I made one, and Charley made one, and the pen wouldn’t
join Charley’s neatly, but twisted it up into a knot.
“Never mind, Charley. We shall do it in time.”
Charley laid down her pen, the copy being finished, opened and shut
her cramped little hand, looked gravely at the page, half in pride and half in
doubt, and got up, and dropped me a curtsy.
“Thank you, miss. If you please, miss, did you know a poor per-
son of the name of Jenny?”
“A brickmaker’s wife, Charley? Yes.”
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“She came and spoke to me when I was out a little while ago, and
said you knew her, miss. She asked me if I wasn’t the young lady’s little
maid—meaning you for the young lady, miss—and I said yes, miss.”
“I thought she had left this neighbourhood altogether, Charley.”
“So she had, miss, but she’s come back again to where she used to
live—she and Liz. Did you know another poor person of the name
of Liz, miss?”
“I think I do, Charley, though not by name.”
“That’s what she said!” returned Chariey. “They have both come
back, miss, and have been tramping high and low.”
“Tramping high and low, have they, Charley?”
“Yes, miss.” If Charley could only have made the letters in her
copy as round as the eyes with which she looked into my face, they
would have been excellent. “And this poor person came about the
house three or four days, hoping to get a glimpse of you, miss—all
she wanted, she said—but you were away. That was when she saw
me. She saw me a-going about, miss,” said Charley with a short
laugh of the greatest delight and pride, “and she thought I looked
like your maid!”
“Did she though, really, Charley?”
“Yes, miss!” said Charley. “Really and truly.” And Charley, with
another short laugh of the purest glee, made her eyes very round
again and looked as serious as became my maid. I was never tired of
seeing Charley in the full enjoyment of that great dignity, standing
before me with her youthful face and figure, and her steady manner,
and her childish exultation breaking through it now and then in the
pleasantest way.
“And where did you see her, Charley?” said I.
My little maid’s countenance fell as she replied, “By the doctor’s
shop, miss.” For Charley wore her black frock yet.
I asked if the brickmaker’s wife were ill, but Charley said no. It
was some one else. Some one in her cottage who had tramped down
to Saint Albans and was tramping he didn’t know where. A poor
boy, Charley said. No father, no mother, no any one. “Like as Tom
might have been, miss, if Emma and me had died after father,” said
Charley, her round eyes filling with tears.
“And she was getting medicine for him, Charley?”
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“She said, miss,” returned Charley, “how that he had once done as
much for her.”
My little maid’s face was so eager and her quiet hands were folded
so closely in one another as she stood looking at me that I had no
great difficulty in reading her thoughts. “Well, Charley,” said I, “it
appears to me that you and I can do no better than go round to
Jenny’s and see what’s the matter.”
The alacrity with which Charley brought my bonnet and veil, and
having dressed me, quaintly pinned herself into her warm shawl and
made herself look like a little old woman, sufficiently expressed her
readiness. So Charley and I, without saying anything to any one,
went out.
It was a cold, wild night, and the trees shuddered in the wind. The
rain had been thick and heavy all day, and with little intermission for
many days. None was falling just then, however. The sky had partly
cleared, but was very gloomy—even above us, where a few stars were
shining. In the north and north-west, where the sun had set three hours
before, there was a pale dead light both beautiful and awful; and into it
long sullen lines of cloud waved up like a sea stricken immovable as it
was heaving. Towards London a lurid glare overhung the whole dark
waste, and the contrast between these two lights, and the fancy which
the redder light engendered of an unearthly fire, gleaming on all the
unseen buildings of the city and on all the faces of its many thousands
of wondering inhabitants, was as solemn as might be.
I had no thought that night—none, I am quite sure—of what was
soon to happen to me. But I have always remembered since that when
we had stopped at the garden-gate to look up at the sky, and when we
went upon our way, I had for a moment an undefinable impression of
myself as being something different from what I then was. I know it
was then and there that I had it. I have ever since connected the feeling
with that spot and time and with everything associated with that spot
and time, to the distant voices in the town, the barking of a dog, and
the sound of wheels coming down the miry hill.
It was Saturday night, and most of the people belonging to the
place where we were going were drinking elsewhere. We found it
quieter than I had previously seen it, though quite as miserable. The
kilns were burning, and a stifling vapour set towards us with a pale-
blue glare.
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Charley shook her head as she methodically drew his rags about
him and made him as warm as she could.
“Oh!” the boy muttered. “Then I s’pose she ain’t.”
“I came to see if I could do you any good,” said I. “What is the
matter with you?”
“I’m a-being froze,” returned the boy hoarsely, with his haggard
gaze wandering about me, “and then burnt up, and then froze, and
then burnt up, ever so many times in a hour. And my head’s all
sleepy, and all a-going mad-like—and I’m so dry—and my bones
isn’t half so much bones as pain.
“When did he come here?” I asked the woman.
“This morning, ma’am, I found him at the corner of the town. I
had known him up in London yonder. Hadn’t I, Jo?”
“Tom-all-Alone’s,” the boy replied.
Whenever he fixed his attention or his eyes, it was only for a very
little while. He soon began to droop his head again, and roll it heavily,
and speak as if he were half awake.
“When did he come from London?” I asked.
“I come from London yes’day,” said the boy himself, now flushed
and hot. “I’m a-going somewheres.”
“Where is he going?” I asked.
“Somewheres,” repeated the boy in a louder tone. “I have been
moved on, and moved on, more nor ever I was afore, since the t’other
one give me the sov’ring. Mrs. Snagsby, she’s always a-watching, and
a-driving of me—what have I done to her?—and they’re all a-watch-
ing and a-driving of me. Every one of ‘em’s doing of it, from the
time when I don’t get up, to the time when I don’t go to bed. And
I’m a-going somewheres. That’s where I’m a-going. She told me,
down in Tom-all-Alone’s, as she came from Stolbuns, and so I took
the Stolbuns Road. It’s as good as another.”
He always concluded by addressing Charley.
“What is to be done with him?” said I, taking the woman aside.
“He could not travel in this state even if he had a purpose and knew
where he was going!”
“I know no more, ma’am, than the dead,” she replied, glancing
compassionately at him. “Perhaps the dead know better, if they could
only tell us. I’ve kept him here all day for pity’s sake, and I’ve given
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him broth and physic, and Liz has gone to try if any one will take
him in (here’s my pretty in the bed—her child, but I call it mine);
but I can’t keep him long, for if my husband was to come home and
find him here, he’d be rough in putting him out and might do him a
hurt. Hark! Here comes Liz back!”
The other woman came hurriedly in as she spoke, and the boy got
up with a half-obscured sense that he was expected to be going. When
the little child awoke, and when and how Charley got at it, took it
out of bed, and began to walk about hushing it, I don’t know. There
she was, doing all this in a quiet motherly manner as if she were
living in Mrs. Blinder’s attic with Tom and Emma again.
The friend had been here and there, and had been played about
from hand to hand, and had come back as she went. At first it was
too early for the boy to be received into the proper refuge, and at last
it was too late. One official sent her to another, and the other sent
her back again to the first, and so backward and forward, until it
appeared to me as if both must have been appointed for their skill in
evading their duties instead of performing them. And now, after all,
she said, breathing quickly, for she had been running and was fright-
ened too, “Jenny, your master’s on the road home, and mine’s not far
behind, and the Lord help the boy, for we can do no more for him!”
They put a few halfpence together and hurried them into his hand,
and so, in an oblivious, half-thankful, half-insensible way, he shuffled
out of the house.
“Give me the child, my dear,” said its mother to Charley, “and
thank you kindly too! Jenny, woman dear, good night!
Young lady, if my master don’t fall out with me, I’ll look down by
the kiln by and by, where the boy will be most like, and again in the
morning!” She hurried off, and presenfty we passed her hushing and
singing to her child at her own door and looking anxiously along the
road for her drunken husband.
I was afraid of staying then to speak to either woman, lest I should
bring her into trouble. But I said to Charley that we must not leave the
boy to die. Charley, who knew what to do much better than I did, and
whose quickness equalled her presence of mind, glided on before me,
and presently we came up with Jo, just short of the brick-kiln.
I think he must have begun his journey with some small bundle un-
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der his arm and must have had it stolen or lost it. For he still carried his
wretched fragment of fur cap like a bundle, though he went bareheaded
through the rain, which now fell fast. He stopped when we called to
him and again showed a dread of me when I came up, standing with his
lustrous eyes fixed upon me, and even arrested in his shivering fit.
I asked him to come with us, and we would take care that he had
some shelter for the night.
“I don’t want no shelter,” he said; “I can lay amongst the warm
bricks.”
“But don’t you know that people die there?” replied Charley.
“They dies everywheres,” said the boy. “They dies in their
lodgings—she knows where; I showed her—and they dies down in
Tom-all-Alone’s in heaps. They dies more than they lives, according
to what I see.” Then he hoarsely whispered Charley, “If she ain’t the
t’other one, she ain’t the forrenner. Is there three of ‘em then?”
Charley looked at me a little frightened. I felt half frightened at
myself when the boy glared on me so.
But he turned and followed when I beckoned to him, and finding
that he acknowledged that influence in me, I led the way straight
home. It was not far, only at the summit of the hill. We passed but
one man. I doubted if we should have got home without assistance,
the boy’s steps were so uncertain and tremulous. He made no com-
plaint, however, and was strangely unconcerned about himself, if I
may say so strange a thing.
Leaving him in the hall for a moment, shrunk into the corner of
the window-seat and staring with an indifference that scarcely could
be called wonder at the comfort and brightness about him, I went
into the drawing-room to speak to my guardian. There I found Mr.
Skimpole, who had come down by the coach, as he frequently did
without notice, and never bringing any clothes with him, but always
borrowing everything he wanted.
They came out with me directly to look at the boy. The servants
had gathered in the hall too, and he shivered in the window-seat with
Charley standing by him, like some wounded animal that had been
found in a ditch.
“This is a sorrowful case,” said my guardian after asking him a
question or two and touching him and examining his eyes. “What
do you say, Harold?”
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quite exquisitely. It was a song that always made him cry, he told us.
He was extremely gay all the rest of the evening, for he absolutely
chirped—those were his delighted words—when he thought by what
a happy talent for business he was surrounded. He gave us, in his
glass of negus, “Better health to our young friend!” and supposed
and gaily pursued the case of his being reserved like Whittington to
become Lord Mayor of London. In that event, no doubt, he would
establish the Jarndyce Institution and the Summerson Almshouses,
and a little annual Corporation Pilgrimage to St. Albans. He had no
doubt, he said, that our young friend was an excellent boy in his way,
but his way was not the Harold Skimpole way; what Harold Skimpole
was, Harold Skimpole had found himself, to his considerable sur-
prise, when he first made his own acquaintance; he had accepted
himself with all his failings and had thought it sound philosophy to
make the best of the bargain; and he hoped we would do the same.
Charley’s last report was that the boy was quiet. I could see, from
my window, the lantern they had left him burning quietly; and I
went to bed very happy to think that he was sheltered.
There was more movement and more talking than usual a little
before daybreak, and it awoke me. As I was dressing, I looked out of
my window and asked one of our men who had been among the
active sympathizers last night whether there was anything wrong about
the house. The lantern was still burning in the loft-window.
“It’s the boy, miss,” said he.
“Is he worse?” I inquired.
“Gone, miss.
“Dead!”
“Dead, miss? No. Gone clean off.”
At what time of the night he had gone, or how, or why, it seemed
hopeless ever to divine. The door remaining as it had been left, and
the lantern standing in the window, it could only be supposed that
he had got out by a trap in the floor which communicated with an
empty cart-house below. But he had shut it down again, if that were
so; and it looked as if it had not been raised. Nothing of any kind
was missing. On this fact being clearly ascertained, we all yielded to
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the painful belief that delirium had come upon him in the night and
that, allured by some imaginary object or pursued by some imagi-
nary horror, he had strayed away in that worse than helpless state; all
of us, that is to say, but Mr. Skimpole, who repeatedly suggested, in
his usual easy light style, that it had occurred to our young friend
that he was not a safe inmate, having a bad kind of fever upon him,
and that he had with great natural politeness taken himself off.
Every possible inquiry was made, and every place was searched. The
brick-kilns were examined, the cottages were visited, the two women
were particularly questioned, but they knew nothing of him, and no-
body could doubt that their wonder was genuine. The weather had for
some time been too wet and the night itself had been too wet to admit
of any tracing by footsteps. Hedge and ditch, and wall, and rick and
stack, were examined by our men for a long distance round, lest the
boy should be lying in such a place insensible or dead; but nothing was
seen to indicate that he had ever been near. From the time when he was
left in the loft-room, he vanished.
The search continued for five days. I do not mean that it ceased
even then, but that my attention was then diverted into a current
very memorable to me.
As Charley was at her writing again in my room in the evening,
and as I sat opposite to her at work, I felt the table tremble. Looking
up, I saw my little maid shivering from head to foot.
“Charley,” said I, “are you so cold?”
“I think I am, miss,” she replied. “I don’t know what it is. I can’t
hold myself still. I felt so yesterday at about this same
time, miss. Don’t be uneasy, I think I’m ill.”
I heard Ada’s voice outside, and I hurried to the door of
communication between my room and our pretty sitting-room, and
locked it. Just in time, for she tapped at it while my hand was yet
upon the key.
Ada called to me to let her in, but I said, “Not now, my dearest.
Go away. There’s nothing the matter; I will come to you presently.”
Ah! It was a long, long time before my darling girl and I were com-
panions again.
Charley fell ill. In twelve hours she was very ill. I moved her to my
room, and laid her in my bed, and sat down quietly to nurse her. I
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told my guardian all about it, and why I felt it was necessary that I
should seclude myself, and my reason for not seeing my darling above
all. At first she came very often to the door, and called to me, and
even reproached me with sobs and tears; but I wrote her a long letter
saying that she made me anxious and unhappy and imploring her, as
she loved me and wished my mind to be at peace, to come no nearer
than the garden. After that she came beneath the window even oftener
than she had come to the door, and if I had learnt to love her dear
sweet voice before when we were hardly ever apart, how did I learn
to love it then, when I stood behind the window-curtain listening
and replying, but not so much as looking out! How did I learn to
love it afterwards, when the harder time came!
They put a bed for me in our sitting-room; and by keeping the
door wide open, I turned the two rooms into one, now that Ada had
vacated that part of the house, and kept them always fresh and airy.
There was not a servant in or about the house but was so good that
they would all most gladly have come to me at any hour of the day
or night without the least fear or unwillingness, but I thought it best
to choose one worthy woman who was never to see Ada and whom
I could trust to come and go with all precaution. Through her means
I got out to take the air with my guardian when there was no fear of
meeting Ada, and wanted for nothing in the way of attendance, any
more than in any other respect.
And thus poor Charley sickened and grew worse, and fell into heavy
danger of death, and lay severely ill for many a long round of day and
night. So patient she was, so uncomplaining, and inspired by such a
gentle fortitude that very often as I sat by Charley holding her head in
my arms—repose would come to her, so, when it would come to her
in no other attitude—I silently prayed to our Father in heaven that I
might not forget the lesson which this little sister taught me.
I was very sorrowful to think that Charley’s pretty looks would
change and be disfigured, even if she recovered—she was such a child
with her dimpled face—but that thought was, for the greater part, lost
in her greater peril. When she was at the worst, and her mind rambled
again to the cares of her father’s sick bed and the little children, she still
knew me so far as that she would be quiet in my arms when she could
lie quiet nowhere else, and murmur out the wanderings of her mind
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less restlessly. At those times I used to think, how should I ever tell the
two remaining babies that the baby who had learned of her faithful
heart to be a mother to them in their need was dead!
There were other times when Charley knew me well and talked to
me, telling me that she sent her love to Tom and Emma and that she
was sure Tom would grow up to be a good man. At those times
Charley would speak to me of what she had read to her father as well
as she could to comfort him, of that young man carried out to be
buried who was the only son of his mother and she was a widow, of
the ruler’s daughter raised up by the gracious hand upon her bed of
death. And Charley told me that when her father died she had kneeled
down and prayed in her first sorrow that he likewise might be raised
up and given back to his poor children, and that if she should never
get better and should die too, she thought it likely that it might
come into Tom’s mind to offer the same prayer for her. Then would
I show Tom how these people of old days had been brought back to
life on earth, only that we might know our hope to
be restored to heaven!
But of all the various times there were in Charley’s illness, there
was not one when she lost the gentle qualities I have spoken of. And
there were many, many when I thought in the night of the last high
belief in the watching angel, and the last higher trust in God, on the
part of her poor despised father.
And Charley did not die. She flutteringiy and slowly turned the
dangerous point, after long lingering there, and then began to mend.
The hope that never had been given, from the first, of Charley being
in outward appearance Charley any more soon began to be encour-
aged; and even that prospered, and I saw her growing into her old
childish likeness again.
It was a great morning when I could tell Ada all this as she stood
out in the garden; and it was a great evening when Charley and I at
last took tea together in the next room. But on that same evening, I
felt that I was stricken cold.
Happily for both of us, it was not until Charley was safe in bed
again and placidly asleep that I began to think the contagion of her
illness was upon me. I had been able easily to hide what I felt at tea-
time, but I was past that already now, and I knew that I was rapidly
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Charley promised, and I lay down, for I was very heavy. I saw the
doctor that night and asked the favour of him that I wished to ask
relative to his saying nothing of my illness in the house as yet. I have
a very indistinct remembrance of that night melting into day, and of
day melting into night again; but I was just able on the first morning
to get to the window and speak to my darling.
On the second morning I heard her dear voice—Oh, how dear
now!—outside; and I asked Charley, with some difficulty (speech
being painful to me), to go and say I was asleep. I heard her answer
softly, “Don’t disturb her, Charley, for the world!”
“How does my own Pride look, Charley?” I inquired.
“Disappointed, miss,” said Charley, peeping through the curtain.
“But I know she is very beautiful this morning.”
“She is indeed, miss,” answered Charley, peeping. “Still looking
up at the window.”
With her blue clear eyes, God bless them, always loveliest when
raised like that!
I called Charley to me and gave her her last charge.
“Now, Charley, when she knows I am ill, she will try to make her
way into the room. Keep her out, Charley, if you love me truly, to
the last! Charley, if you let her in but once, only to look upon me for
one moment as I lie here, I shall die.”
“I never will! I never will!” she promised me.
“I believe it, my dear Charley. And now come and sit beside me
for a little while, and touch me with your hand. For I cannot see you,
Charley; I am blind.”
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CHAPTER XXXII
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door-step over a few parting words. Mr. Krook and his lodger, and
the fact of Mr. Krook’s being “continually in liquor,” and the testa-
mentary prospects of the young man are, as usual, the staple of their
conversation. But they have something to say, likewise, of the Har-
monic Meeting at the Sol’s Arms, where the sound of the piano
through the partly opened windows jingles out into the court, and
where Little Swills, after keeping the lovers of harmony in a roar like
a very Yorick, may now be heard taking the gruff line in a concerted
piece and sentimentally adjuring his friends and patrons to “Listen,
listen, listen, tew the wa-ter fall!” Mrs. Perkins and Mrs. Piper com-
pare opinions on the subject of the young lady of professional celeb-
rity who assists at the Harmonic Meetings and who has a space to
herself in the manuscript announcement in the window, Mrs. Perkins
possessing information that she has been married a year and a half,
though announced as Miss M. Melvilleson, the noted siren, and that
her baby is clandestinely conveyed to the Sol’s Arms every night to
receive its natural nourishment during the entertainments. “Sooner
than which, myself,” says Mrs. Perkins, “I would get my living by
selling lucifers.” Mrs. Piper, as in duty bound, is of the same opin-
ion, holding that a private station is better than public applause, and
thanking heaven for her own (and, by implication, Mrs. Perkins’)
respectability. By this time the pot-boy of the Sol’s Arms appearing
with her supper-pint well frothed, Mrs. Piper accepts that tankard
and retires indoors, first giving a fair good night to Mrs. Perkins,
who has had her own pint in her hand ever since it was fetched from
the same hostelry by young Perkins before he was sent to bed. Now
there is a sound of putting up shop-shutters in the court and a smell
as of the smoking of pipes; and shooting stars are seen in upper win-
dows, further indicating retirement to rest. Now, too, the policeman
begins to push at doors; to try fastenings; to be suspicious of bundles;
and to administer his beat, on the hypothesis that every one is either
robbing or being robbed.
It is a close night, though the damp cold is searching too, and
there is a laggard mist a little way up in the air. It is a fine steaming
night to turn the slaughter-houses, the unwholesome trades, the sew-
erage, bad water, and burial-grounds to account, and give the regis-
trar of deaths some extra business. It may be something in the air—
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point upon it—that they were quite fresh when they were shown
the gridiron.”
“That’s very likely. It’s a tainting sort of weather.”
“It is a tainting sort of weather,” says Mr. Snagsby, “and I find it
sinking to the spirits.”
“By George! I find it gives me the horrors,” returns Mr. Weevle.
“Then, you see, you live in a lonesome way, and in a lonesome
room, with a black circumstance hanging over it,” says Mr. Snagsby,
looking in past the other’s shoulder along the dark passage and then
falling back a step to look up at the house. “I couldn’t live in that
room alone, as you do, sir. I should get so fidgety and worried of an
evening, sometimes, that I should be driven to come to the door and
stand here sooner than sit there. But then it’s very true that you didn’t
see, in your room, what I saw there. That makes a difference.”
“I know quite enough about it,” returns Tony.
“It’s not agreeable, is it?” pursues Mr. Snagsby, coughing his cough
of mild persuasion behind his hand. “Mr. Krook ought to consider it
in the rent. I hope he does, I am sure.”
“I hope he does,” says Tony. “But I doubt it.”
“You find the rent too high, do you, sir?” returns the stationer.
“Rents are high about here. I don’t know how it is exactly, but the
law seems to put things up in price. Not,” adds Mr. Snagsby with his
apologetic cough, “that I mean to say a word against the profession I
get my living by.”
Mr. Weevle again glances up and down the court and then looks at
the stationer. Mr. Snagsby, blankly catching his eye, looks upward
for a star or so and coughs a cough expressive of not exactly seeing his
way out of this conversation.
“It’s a curious fact, sir,” he observes, slowly rubbing his hands,
“that he should have been—”
“Who’s he?” interrupts Mr. Weevle.
“The deceased, you know,” says Mr. Snagsby, twitching his head
and right eyebrow towards the staircase and tapping his acquaintance
on the button.
“Ah, to be sure!” returns the other as if he were not over-fond of
the subject. “I thought we had done with him.”
“I was only going to say it’s a curious fact, sir, that he should have
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come and lived here, and been one of my writers, and then that you
should come and live here, and be one of my writers too. Which
there is nothing derogatory, but far from it in the appellation,” says
Mr. Snagsby, breaking off with a mistrust that he may have unpolitely
asserted a kind of proprietorship in Mr. Weevle, “because I have known
writers that have gone into brewers’ houses and done really very re-
spectable indeed. Eminently respectable, sir,” adds Mr. Snagsby with
a misgiving that he has not improved the matter.
“It’s a curious coincidence, as you say,” answers Weevle, once more
glancing up and down the court.
“Seems a fate in it, don’t there?” suggests the stationer.
“There does.”
“Just so,” observes the stationer with his confirmatory cough. “Quite
a fate in it. Quite a fate. Well, Mr. Weevle, I am afraid I must bid you
good night”—Mr. Snagsby speaks as if it made him desolate to go,
though he has been casting about for any means of escape ever since
he stopped to speak—”my little woman will be looking for me else.
Good night, sir!”
If Mr. Snagsby hastens home to save his little woman the trouble
of looking for him, he might set his mind at rest on that score. His
little woman has had her eye upon him round the Sol’s Arms all this
time and now glides after him with a pocket handkerchief wrapped
over her head, honourmg Mr. Weevle and his doorway with a search-
ing glance as she goes past.
“You’ll know me again, ma’am, at all events,” says Mr. Weevle to
himself; “and I can’t compliment you on your appearance, whoever
you are, with your head tied up in a bundle. Is this fellow never
coming!”
This fellow approaches as he speaks. Mr. Weevle softly holds up
his finger, and draws him into the passage, and closes the street door.
Then they go upstairs, Mr. Weevle heavily, and Mr. Guppy (for it is
he) very lightly indeed. When they are shut into the back room, they
speak low.
“I thought you had gone to Jericho at least instead of coming
here,” says Tony.
“Why, I said about ten.”
“You said about ten,” Tony repeats. “Yes, so you did say about ten.
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vase upon the pedestal, and her shawl upon the vase, and a prodi-
gious piece of fur upon the shawl, and her arm on the prodigious
piece of fur, and a bracelet on her arm.
“That’s very like Lady Dedlock,” says Mr. Guppy. “It’s a speak-
ing likeness.”
“I wish it was,” growls Tony, without changing his position. “I
should have some fashionable conversation, here, then.”
Finding by this time that his friend is not to be wheedled into a
more sociable humour, Mr. Guppy puts about upon the ill-used
tack and remonstrates with him.
“Tony,” says he, “I can make allowances for lowness of spirits, for
no man knows what it is when it does come upon a man better than
I do, and no man perhaps has a better right to know it than a man
who has an unrequited image imprinted on his ‘eart. But there are
bounds to these things when an unoffending party is in question,
and I will acknowledge to you, Tony, that I don’t think your manner
on the present occasion is hospitable or quite gentlemanly.”
“This is strong language, William Guppy,” returns Mr. Weevle.
“Sir, it may be,” retorts Mr. William Guppy, “but I feel strongly
when I use it.”
Mr. Weevle admits that he has been wrong and begs Mr. William
Guppy to think no more about it. Mr. William Guppy, however,
having got the advantage, cannot quite release it without a little more
injured remonstrance.
“No! Dash it, Tony,” says that gentleman, “you really ought to be
careful how you wound the feelings of a man who has an unrequited
image imprinted on his ‘eart and who is not altogether happy in those
chords which vibrate to the tenderest emotions. You, Tony, possess
in yourself all that is calculated to charm the eye and allure the taste.
It is not—happily for you, perhaps, and I may wish that I could say
the same—it is not your character to hover around one flower. The
ole garden is open to you, and your airy pinions carry you through it.
Still, Tony, far be it from me, I am sure, to wound even your feelings
without a cause!”
Tony again entreats that the subject may be no longer pursued,
saying emphatically, “William Guppy, drop it!” Mr. Guppy acqui-
esces, with the reply, “I never should have taken it up, Tony, of my
own accord.”
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“And now,” says Tony, stirring the fire, “touching this same bundle
of letters. Isn’t it an extraordinary thing of Krook to have appointed
twelve o’clock to-night to hand ‘em over to me?”
“Very. What did he do it for?”
“What does he do anything for? He don’t know. Said to-day was
his birthday and he’d hand ‘em over to-night at twelve o’clock. He’ll
have drunk himself blind by that time. He has been at it all day.”
“He hasn’t forgotten the appointment, I hope?”
“Forgotten? Trust him for that. He never forgets anything. I saw
him to-night, about eight—helped him to shut up his shop—and he
had got the letters then in his hairy cap. He pulled it off and showed
‘em me. When the shop was closed, he took them out of his cap,
hung his cap on the chair-back, and stood turning them over before
the fire. I heard him a little while afterwards, through the floor here,
humming like the wind, the only song he knows—about Bibo, and
old Charon, and Bibo being drunk when he died, or something or
other. He has been as quiet since as an old rat asleep in his hole.”
“And you are to go down at twelve?”
“At twelve. And as I tell you, when you came it seemed to me a
hundred.”
“Tony,” says Mr. Guppy after considering a little with his legs
crossed, “he can’t read yet, can he?”
“Read! He’ll never read. He can make all the letters separately, and
he knows most of them separately when he sees them; he has got on
that much, under me; but he can’t put them together. He’s too old
to acquire the knack of it now—and too drunk.”
“Tony,” says Mr. Guppy, uncrossing and recrossing his legs, “how
do you suppose he spelt out that name of Hawdon?”
“He never spelt it out. You know what a curious power of eye he
has and how he has been used to employ himself in copying things
by eye alone. He imitated it, evidently from the direction of a letter,
and asked me what it meant.”
“Tony,” says Mr. Guppy, uncrossing and recrossing his legs again,
“should you say that the original was a man’s writing or a woman’s?”
“A woman’s. Fifty to one a lady’s—slopes a good deal, and the end
of the letter ‘n,’ long and hasty.”
Mr. Guppy has been biting his thumb-nail during this dialogue,
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generally changing the thumb when he has changed the cross leg. As
he is going to do so again, he happens to look at his coat-sleeve. It
takes his attention. He stares at it, aghast.
“Why, Tony, what on earth is going on in this house to-night? Is
there a chimney on fire?”
“Chimney on fire!”
“Ah!” returns Mr. Guppy. “See how the soot’s falling. See here, on
my arm! See again, on the table here! Confound the stuff, it won’t
blow off—smears like black fat!”
They look at one another, and Tony goes listening to the door,
and a little way upstairs, and a little way downstairs. Comes back and
says it’s all right and all quiet, and quotes the remark he lately made
to Mr. Snagsby about their cooking chops at the Sol’s Arms.
“And it was then,” resumes Mr. Guppy, still glancing with
remarkable aversion at the coat-sleeve, as they pursue their
conversation before the fire, leaning on opposite sides of the
table, with their heads very near together, “that he told you of his
having taken the bundle of letters from his lodger’s portmanteau?”
“That was the time, sir,” answers Tony, faintly adjusting his whis-
kers. “Whereupon I wrote a line to my dear boy, the Honourable
William Guppy, informing him of the appointment for to-night
and advising him not to call before, Boguey being a slyboots.”
The light vivacious tone of fashionable life which is usually as-
sumed by Mr. Weevle sits so ill upon him to-night that he abandons
that and his whiskers together, and after looking over his shoulder,
appears to yield himself up a prey to the horrors again.
“You are to bring the letters to your room to read and compare,
and to get yourself into a position to tell him all about them. That’s
the arrangement, isn’t it, Tony?” asks Mr. Guppy, anxiously biting
his thumb-nail.
“You can’t speak too low. Yes. That’s what he and I agreed.”
“I tell you what, Tony—”
“You can’t speak too low,” says Tony once more. Mr. Guppy nods
his sagacious head, advances it yet closer, and drops into a whisper.
“I tell you what. The first thing to be done is to make another packet
like the real one so that if he should ask to see the real one while it’s in my
possession, you can show him the dummy.”
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no substance in them, and the tread of dreadful feet that would leave
no mark on the sea-sand or the winter snow. So sensitive the two
friends happen to be that the air is full of these phantoms, and the two
look over their shoulders by one consent to see that the door is shut.
“Yes, Tony?” says Mr. Guppy, drawing nearer to the fire and biting
his unsteady thumb-nail. “You were going to say, thirdly?”
“It’s far from a pleasant thing to be plotting about a dead man in
the room where he died, especially when you happen to live in it.”
“But we are plotting nothing against him, Tony.”
“May be not, still I don’t like it. Live here by yourself and see how
you like it.”
“As to dead men, Tony,” proceeds Mr. Guppy, evading this pro-
posal, “there have been dead men in most rooms.”
“I know there have, but in most rooms you let them alone, and—
and they let you alone,” Tony answers.
The two look at each other again. Mr. Guppy makes a hurried
remark to the effect that they may be doing the deceased a service,
that he hopes so. There is an oppressive blank until Mr. Weevle, by
stirring the fire suddenly, makes Mr. Guppy start as if his heart had
been stirred instead.
“Fah! Here’s more of this hateful soot hanging about,” says he.
“Let us open the window a bit and get a mouthful of air. It’s too
close.”
He raises the sash, and they both rest on the window-sill, half in and
half out of the room. The neighbouring houses are too near to admit
of their seeing any sky without craning their necks and looking up, but
lights in frowsy windows here and there, and the rolling of distant
carriages, and the new expression that there is of the stir of men, they
find to be comfortable. Mr. Guppy, noiselessly tapping on the win-
dow-sill, resumes his whisperirig in quite a light-comedy tone.
“By the by, Tony, don’t forget old Smallweed,” meaning the younger of
that name. “I have not let him into this, you know. That grandfather of his
is too keen by half. It runs in the family.”
“I remember,” says Tony. “I am up to all that.”
“And as to Krook,” resumes Mr. Guppy. “Now, do you suppose
he really has got hold of any other papers of importance, as he has
boasted to you, since you have been such allies?”
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He so washes, and rubs, and scrubs, and smells, and washes, that
he has not long restored himself with a glass of brandy and stood
silently before the fire when Saint Paul’s bell strikes twelve and all
those other bells strike twelve from their towers of various heights in
the dark air, and in their many tones. When all is quiet again, the
lodger says, “It’s the appointed time at last. Shall I go?”
Mr. Guppy nods and gives him a “lucky touch” on the back, but
not with the washed hand, though it is his right hand.
He goes downstairs, and Mr. Guppy tries to compose himself be-
fore the fire for waiting a long time. But in no more than a minute
or two the stairs creak and Tony comes swiftly back.
“Have you got them?”
“Got them! No. The old man’s not there.”
He has been so horribly frightened in the short interval that his
terror seizes the other, who makes a rush at him and asks loudly,
“What’s the matter?”
“I couldn’t make him hear, and I softly opened the door and looked
in. And the burning smell is there—and the soot is there, and the oil
is there—and he is not there!” Tony ends this with a groan.
Mr. Guppy takes the light. They go down, more dead than alive,
and holding one another, push open the door of the back shop. The
cat has retreated close to it and stands snarling, not at them, at some-
thing on the ground before the fire. There is a very little fire left in
the grate, but there is a smouldering, suffocating vapour in the room
and a dark, greasy coating on the walls and ceiling. The chairs and
table, and the bottle so rarely absent from the table, all stand as usual.
On one chair-back hang the old man’s hairy cap and coat.
“Look!” whispers the lodger, pointing his friend’s attention to these
objects with a trembling finger. “I told you so. When I saw him last,
he took his cap off, took out the little bundle of old letters, hung his
cap on the back of the chair—his coat was there already, for he had
pulled that off before he went to put the shutters up—and I left him
turning the letters over in his hand, standing just where that crumbled
black thing is upon the floor.”
Is he hanging somewhere? They look up. No.
“See!” whispers Tony. “At the foot of the same chair there lies a
dirty bit of thin red cord that they tie up pens with. That went round
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CHAPTER XXXIII
Interlopers
NOW DO THOSE TWO GENTLEMEN not very neat about the cuffs and
buttons who attended the last coroner’s inquest at the Sol’s Arms reap-
pear in the precincts with surprising swiftness (being, in fact, breath-
lessly fetched by the active and intelligent beadle), and institute
perquisitions through the court, and dive into the Sol’s parlour, and
write with ravenous little pens on tissue-paper. Now do they note
down, in the watches of the night, how the neighbourhood of Chan-
cery Lane was yesterday, at about midnight, thrown into a state of the
most intense agitation and excitement by the following alarming and
horrible discovery. Now do they set forth how it will doubtless be
remembered that some time back a painful sensation was created in
the public mind by a case of mysterious death from opium occurring
in the first floor of the house occupied as a rag, bottle, and general
marine store shop, by an eccentric individual of intemperate habits, far
advanced in life, named Krook; and how, by a remarkable coincidence,
Krook was examined at the inquest, which it may be recollected was
held on that occasion at the Sol’s Arms, a well-conducted tavern im-
mediately adjoining the premises in question on the west side and
licensed to a highly respectable landlord, Mr. James George Bogsby.
Now do they show (in as many words as possible) how during some
hours of yesterday evening a very peculiar smell was observed by the
inhabitants of the court, in which the tragical occurrence which forms
the subject of that present account transpired; and which odour was at
one time so powerful that Mr. Swills, a comic vocalist professionally
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Mr. Weevle and his friend Mr. Guppy are within the bar at the Sol
and are worth anything to the Sol that the bar contains if they will
only stay there. “This is not a time, says Mr. Bogsby, “to haggle
about money,” though he looks something sharply after it, over the
counter; “give your orders, you two gentlemen, and you’re welcome
to whatever you put a name to.”
Thus entreated, the two gentlemen (Mr. Weevle especially) put
names to so many things that in course of time they find it difficult
to put a name to anything quite distinctly, though they still relate to
all new-comers some version of the night they have had of it, and of
what they said, and what they thought, and what they saw. Mean-
while, one or other of the policemen often flits about the door, and
pushing it open a little way at the full length of his arm, looks in
from outer gloom. Not that he has any suspicions, but that he may
as well know what they are up to in there.
Thus night pursues its leaden course, finding the court still out of
bed through the unwonted hours, still treating and being treated,
still conducting itself similarly to a court that has had a little money
left it unexpectedly. Thus night at length with slow-retreating steps
departs, and the lamp-lighter going his rounds, like an executioner to
a despotic king, strikes off the little heads of fire that have aspired to
lessen the darkness. Thus the day cometh, whether or no.
And the day may discern, even with its dim London eye, that the
court has been up all night. Over and above the faces that have fallen
drowsily on tables and the heels that lie prone on hard floors instead
of beds, the brick and mortar physiognomy of the very court itself
looks worn and jaded. And now the neighbourhood, waking up and
beginning to hear of what has happened, comes streaming in, half
dressed, to ask questions; and the two policemen and the helmet
(who are far less impressible externally than the court) have enough
to do to keep the door.
“Good gracious, gentlemen!” says Mr. Snagsby, coming up.
“What’s this I hear!”
“Why, it’s true,” returns one of the policemen. “That’s what it is.
Now move on here, come!”
“Why, good gracious, gentlemen,” says Mr. Snagsby, somewhat
promptly backed away, “I was at this door last night betwixt ten and
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eleven o’clock in conversation with the young man who lodges here.”
“Indeed?” returns the policeman. “You will find the young man
next door then. Now move on here, some of you,”
“Not hurt, I hope?” says Mr. Snagsby.
“Hurt? No. What’s to hurt him!”
Mr. Snagsby, wholly unable to answer this or any question in his
troubled mind, repairs to the Sol’s Arms and finds Mr. Weevle languish-
ing over tea and toast with a considerable expression on him of exhausted
excitement and exhausted tobacco-smoke.
“And Mr. Guppy likewise!” quoth Mr. Snagsby. “Dear, dear, dear!
What a fate there seems in all this! And my lit—”
Mr. Snagsby’s power of speech deserts him in the formation of the
words “my little woman.” For to see that injured female walk into
the Sol’s Arms at that hour of the morning and stand before the
beer-engine, with her eyes fixed upon him like an accusing spirit,
strikes him dumb.
“My dear,” says Mr. Snagsby when his tongue is loosened, “will
you take anything? A little—not to put too fine a point upon it—
drop of shrub?”
“No,” says Mrs. Snagsby.
“My love, you know these two gentlemen?”
“Yes!” says Mrs. Snagsby, and in a rigid manner acknowledges their
presence, still fixing Mr. Snagsby with her eye.
The devoted Mr. Snagsby cannot bear this treatment. He takes
Mrs. Snagsby by the hand and leads her aside to an adjacent cask.
“My little woman, why do you look at me in that way? Pray don’t
do it.”
“I can’t help my looks,” says Mrs. Snagsby, “and if I could I
wouldn’t.”
Mr. Snagsby, with his cough of meekness, rejoins, “Wouldn’t you
really, my dear?” and meditates. Then coughs his cough of trouble
and says, “This is a dreadful mystery, my love!” still fearfully discon-
certed by Mrs. Snagsby’s eye.
“It is,” returns Mrs. Snagsby, shaking her head, “a dreadful mystery.”
“My little woman,” urges Mr. Snagsby in a piteous manner, “don’t
for goodness’ sake speak to me with that bitter expression and look
at me in that searching way! I beg and entreat of you not to do it.
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into Lincoln’s Inn to take a little walk about the square and clear as
many of the dark cobwebs out of their brains as a little walk may.
“There can be no more favourable time than the present, Tony,”
says Mr. Guppy after they have broodingly made out the four sides
of the square, “for a word or two between us upon a point on which
we must, with very little delay, come to an understanding.”
“Now, I tell you what, William G.!” returns the other, eyeing his
companion with a bloodshot eye. “If it’s a point of conspiracy, you
needn’t take the trouble to mention it. I have had enough of that,
and I ain’t going to have any more. We shall have you taking fire next
or blowing up with a bang.”
This supposititious phenomenon is so very disagreeable to Mr.
Guppy that his voice quakes as he says in a moral way, “Tony, I
should have thought that what we went through last night would
have been a lesson to you never to be personal any more as long as
you lived.” To which Mr. Weevle returns, “William, I should have
thought it would have been a lesson to you never to conspire any
more as long as you lived.” To which Mr. Guppy says, “Who’s con-
spiring?” To which Mr. Jobling replies, “Why, you are!” To which
Mr. Guppy retorts, “No, I am not.” To which Mr. Jobling retorts
again, “Yes, you are!” To which Mr. Guppy retorts, “Who says so?”
To which Mr. Jobling retorts, “I say so!” To which Mr. Guppy re-
torts, “Oh, indeed?” To which Mr. Jobling retorts, “Yes, indeed!”
And both being now in a heated state, they walk on silently for a
while to cool down again.
“Tony,” says Mr. Guppy then, “if you heard your friend out in-
stead of flying at him, you wouldn’t fall into mistakes. But your
temper is hasty and you are not considerate. Possessing in yourself,
Tony, all that is calculated to charm the eye—”
“Oh! Blow the eye!” cries Mr. Weevle, cutting him short. “Say
what you have got to say!”
Finding his friend in this morose and material condition, Mr.
Guppy only expresses the finer feelings of his soul through the tone
of injury in which he recommences, “Tony, when I say there is a
point on which we must come to an understanding pretty soon, I say
so quite apart from any kind of conspiring, however innocent. You
know it is professionally arranged beforehand in all cases that are
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and I’ll have my lawful revenge upon you. My dear young men, be
easy with me, if you please. Allow me to catch you round the neck. I
won’t squeeze you tighter than I can help. Oh, Lord! Oh, dear me!
Oh, my bones!”
It is well that the Sol is not far off, for Mr. Weevle presents an
apoplectic appearance before half the distance is accomplished. With
no worse aggravation of his symptoms, however, than the utterance
of divers croaking sounds expressive of obstructed respiration, he
fulils his share of the porterage and the benevolent old gentleman is
deposited by his own desire in the parlour of the Sol’s Arms.
“Oh, Lord!” gasps Mr. Smallweed, looking about him, breathless,
from an arm-chair. “Oh, dear me! Oh, my bones and back! Oh, my
aches and pains! Sit down, you dancing, prancing, shambling, scram-
bling poll-parrot! Sit down!”
This little apostrophe to Mrs. Smallweed is occasioned by a propen-
sity on the part of that unlucky old lady whenever she finds herself on
her feet to amble about and “set” to inanimate objects, accompanying
herself with a chattering noise, as in a witch dance. A nervous affection
has probably as much to do with these demonstrations as any imbecile
intention in the poor old woman, but on the present occasion they are
so particularly lively in connexion with the Windsor arm-chair, fellow
to that in which Mr. Smallweed is seated, that she only quite desists
when her grandchildren have held her down in it, her lord in the mean-
while bestowing upon her, with great volubility, the endearing epithet
of “a pig-headed jackdaw,” repeated a surprising number of times.
“My dear sir,” Grandfather Smallweed then proceeds, addressing
Mr. Guppy, “there has been a calamity here. Have you heard of it,
either of you?”
“Heard of it, sir! Why, we discovered it.”
“You discovered it. You two discovered it! Bart, they discovered
it!”
The two discoverers stare at the Smallweeds, who return the com-
pliment.
“My dear friends,” whines Grandfather Smallweed, putting out both
his hands, “I owe you a thousand thanks for discharging the melan-
choly office of discovering the ashes of Mrs. Smallweed’s brother.”
“Eh?” says Mr. Guppy.
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song of King Death, with chorus by the whole strength of the com-
pany,” as the great Harmonic feature of the week and announces in
the bill that “J. G. B. is induced to do so at a considerable extra
expense in consequence of a wish which has been very generally ex-
pressed at the bar by a large body of respectable individuals and in
homage to a late melancholy event which has aroused so much sensa-
tion.” There is one point connected with the deceased upon which
the court is particularly anxious, namely, that the fiction of a full-
sized coffin should be preserved, though there is so little to put in it.
Upon the undertaker’s stating in the Sol’s bar in the course of the day
that he has received orders to construct “a six-footer,” the general
solicitude is much relieved, and it is considered that Mr. Smallweed’s
conduct does him great honour.
Out of the court, and a long way out of it, there is considerable
excitement too, for men of science and philosophy come to look,
and carriages set down doctors at the corner who arrive with the
same intent, and there is more learned talk about inflammable gases
and phosphuretted hydrogen than the court has ever imagined. Some
of these authorities (of course the wisest) hold with indignation that
the deceased had no business to die in the alleged manner; and being
reminded by other authorities of a certain inquiry into the evidence
for such deaths reprinted in the sixth volume of the Philosophical
Transactions; and also of a book not quite unknown on English
medical jurisprudence; and likewise of the Italian case of the Count-
ess Cornelia Baudi as set forth in detail by one Bianchini, prebendary
of Verona, who wrote a scholarly work or so and was occasionally
heard of in his time as having gleams of reason in him; and also of
the testimony of Messrs. Fodere and Mere, two pestilent Frenchmen
who would investigate the subject; and further, of the corroborative
testimony of Monsieur Le Cat, a rather celebrated French surgeon
once upon a time, who had the unpoliteness to live in a house where
such a case occurred and even to write an account of it—still they
regard the late Mr. Krook’s obstinacy in going out of the world by
any such by-way as wholly unjustifiable and personally offensive.
The less the court understands of all this, the more the court likes it,
and the greater enjoyment it has in the stock in trade of the Sol’s
Arms. Then there comes the artist of a picture newspaper, with a
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Mr. Guppy looks into the shade in all directions, discovering ev-
erywhere a certain charred and whitened little heap of coal or wood.
Presently he hears a rustling. Is it—? No, it’s no ghost, but fair flesh
and blood, most brilliantly dressed.
“I have to beg your ladyship’s pardon,” Mr. Guppy stammers, very
downcast. “This is an inconvenient time—”
“I told you, you could come at any time.” She takes a chair, look-
ing straight at him as on the last occasion.
“Thank your ladyship. Your ladyship is very affable.”
“You can sit down.” There is not much affability in her tone.
“I don’t know, your ladyship, that it’s worth while my sitting down
and detaining you, for I—I have not got the letters that I mentioned
when I had the honour of waiting on your ladyship.”
“Have you come merely to say so?”
“Merely to say so, your ladyship.” Mr. Guppy besides being de-
pressed, disappointed, and uneasy, is put at a further by the splendour
and beauty of her appearance.
She knows its influence perfectly, has studied it too well to miss a
grain of its effect on any one. As she looks at him so steadily and
coldly, he not only feels conscious that he has no guide in the least
perception of what is really the complexion of her thoughts, but also
that he is being every moment, as it were, removed further and fur-
ther from her.
She will not speak, it is plain. So he must.
“In short, your ladyship,” says Mr. Guppy like a meanly penitent
thief, “the person I was to have had the letters of, has come to a sudden
end, and—” He stops. Lady Dedlock calmly finishes the sentence.
“And the letters are destroyed with the person?”
Mr. Guppy would say no if he could—as he is unable to hide.
“I believe so, your ladyship.”
If he could see the least sparkle of relief in her face now? No, he
could see no such thing, even if that brave outside did not utterly put
him away, and he were not looking beyond it and about it.
He falters an awkward excuse or two for his failure.
“Is this all you have to say?” inquires Lady Dedlock, having heard
him out—or as nearly out as he can stumble.
Mr. Guppy thinks that’s all.
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“You had better be sure that you wish to say nothing more to me,
this being the last time you will have the opportunity.”
Mr. Guppy is quite sure. And indeed he has no such wish at present,
by any means.
“That is enough. I will dispense with excuses. Good evening to
you!” And she rings for Mercury to show the young man of the
name of Guppy out.
But in that house, in that same moment, there happens to be an old
man of the name of Tulkinghorn. And that old man, coming with his
quiet footstep to the library, has his hand at that moment on the handle
of the door—comes in—and comes face to face with the young man as
he is leaving the room.
One glance between the old man and the lady, and for an instant
the blind that is always down flies up. Suspicion, eager and sharp,
looks out. Another instant, close again.
“I beg your pardon, Lady Dedlock. I beg your pardon a thousand
times. It is so very unusual to find you here at this hour. I supposed
the room was empty. I beg your pardon!”
“Stay!” She negligently calls him back. “Remain here, I beg. I am
going out to dinner. I have nothing more to say to this young man!”
The disconcerted young man bows, as he goes out, and cringingly
hopes that Mr. Tulkinghorn of the Fields is well.
“Aye, aye?” says the lawyer, looking at him from under his bent
brows, though he has no need to look again—not he. “From Kenge
and Carboy’s, surely?”
“Kenge and Carboy’s, Mr. Tulkinghorn. Name of Guppy, sir.”
“To be sure. Why, thank you, Mr. Guppy, I am very well!”
“Happy to hear it, sir. You can’t be too well, sir, for the credit of
the profession.”
“Thank you, Mr. Guppy!”
Mr. Guppy sneaks away. Mr. Tulkinghorn, such a foil in his old-
fashioned rusty black to Lady Dedlock’s brightness, hands her down the
staircase to her carriage. He returns rubbing his chin, and rubs it a good
deal in the course of the evening.
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CHAPTER XXXIV
“NOW, WHAT,” SAYS MR. GEORGE, “may this be? Is it blank cartridge
or ball? A flash in the pan or a shot?”
An open letter is the subject of the trooper’s speculations, and it
seems to perplex him mightily. He looks at it at arm’s length, brings
it close to him, holds it in his right hand, holds it in his left hand,
reads it with his head on this side, with his head on that side, con-
tracts his eyebrows, elevates them, still cannot satisfy himself. He
smooths it out upon the table with his heavy palm, and thoughtfully
walking up and down the gallery, makes a halt before it every now
and then to come upon it with a fresh eye. Even that won’t do. “Is
it,” Mr. George still muses, “blank cartridge or ball?”
Phil Squod, with the aid of a brush and paint-pot, is employed in
the distance whitening the targets, softly whistling in quick-march
time and in drum-and-fife manner that he must and will go back
again to the girl he left behind him.
“Phil!” The trooper beckons as he calls him.
Phil approaches in his usual way, sidling off at first as if he
were going anywhere else and then bearing down upon his com-
mander like a bayonet-charge. Certain splashes of white show in high
relief upon his dirty face, and he scrapes his one eyebrow with the
handle of the brush.
“Attention, Phil! Listen to this.”
“Steady, commander, steady.”
“‘Sir. Allow me to remind you (though there is no legal necessity
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for my doing so, as you are aware) that the bill at two months’ date
drawn on yourself by Mr. Matthew Bagnet, and by you accepted, for
the sum of ninety-seven pounds four shillings and ninepence, will
become due to-morrow, when you will please be prepared to take up
the same on presentation. Yours, Joshua Smallweed.’ What do you
make of that, Phil?”
“Mischief, guv’ner.”
“Why?”
“I think,” replies Phil after pensively tracing out a cross-wrinkle in
his forehead with the brush-handle, “that mischeevious consequences
is always meant when money’s asked for.”
“Lookye, Phil,” says the trooper, sitting on the table. “First and
last, I have paid, I may say, half as much again as this principal in
interest and one thing and another.”
Phil intimates by sidling back a pace or two, with a very
unaccountable wrench of his wry face, that he does not regard the
transaction as being made more promising by this incident.
“And lookye further, Phil,” says the trooper, staying his premature
conclusions with a wave of his hand. “There has always been an un-
derstanding that this bill was to be what they call renewed. And it has
been renewed no end of times. What do you say now?”
“I say that I think the times is come to a end at last.”
“You do? Humph! I am much of the same mind myself.”
“Joshua Smallweed is him that was brought here in a chair?”
“The same.”
“Guv’ner,” says Phil with exceeding gravity, “he’s a leech in his
dispositions, he’s a screw and a wice in his actions, a snake in his
twistings, and a lobster in his claws.”
Having thus expressively uttered his sentiments, Mr. Squod, after
waiting a little to ascertain if any further remark be expected of him,
gets back by his usual series of movements to the target he has in
hand and vigorously signifies through his former musical medium
that he must and he will return to that ideal young lady. George,
having folded the letter, walks in that direction.
“There is a way, commander,” says Phil, looking cunningly at him,
“of settling this.”
“Paying the money, I suppose? I wish I could.”
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Phil shakes his head. “No, guv’ner, no; not so bad as that. There is
a way,” says Phil with a highly artistic turn of his brush; “what I’m a-
doing at present.”
“Whitewashing.”
Phil nods.
“A pretty way that would be! Do you know what would become
of the Bagnets in that case? Do you know they would be ruined to
pay off my old scores? You’re a moral character,” says the trooper,
eyeing him in his large way with no small indignation; “upon my life
you are, Phil!”
Phil, on one knee at the target, is in course of protesting
earnestly, though not without many allegorical scoops of his brush
and smoothings of the white surface round the rim with his thumb,
that he had forgotten the Bagnet responsibility and would not so
much as injure a hair of the head of any member of that worthy
family when steps are audible in the long passage without, and a
cheerful voice is heard to wonder whether George is at home. Phil,
with a look at his master, hobbles up, saying, “Here’s the guv’ner,
Mrs. Bagnet! Here he is!” and the old girl herself, accompanied by
Mr. Bagnet, appears.
The old girl never appears in walking trim, in any season of the
year, without a grey cloth cloak, coarse and much worn but very
clean, which is, undoubtedly, the identical garment rendered so in-
teresting to Mr. Bagnet by having made its way home to Europe
from another quarter of the globe in company with Mrs. Bagnet and
an umbrella. The latter faithful appendage is also invariably a part of
the old girl’s presence out of doors. It is of no colour known in this
life and has a corrugated wooden crook for a handle, with a metallic
object let into its prow, or beak, resembling a little model of a fan-
light over a street door or one of the oval glasses out of a pair of
spectacles, which ornamental object has not that tenacious capacity
of sticking to its post that might be desired in an article long associ-
ated with the British army. The old girl’s umbrella is of a flabby
habit of waist and seems to be in need of stays—an appearance that is
possibly referable to its having served through a series of years at
home as a cupboard and on journeys as a carpet bag. She never puts it
up, having the greatest reliance on her well-proved cloak with its
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“Old girl,” murmurs Mr. Bagnet after a short silence, “will you tell
him my opinion?”
“Oh! Why didn’t he marry,” Mrs. Bagnet answers, half laughing
and half crying, “Joe Pouch’s widder in North America? Then he
wouldn’t have got himself into these troubles.”
“The old girl,” says Mr. Baguet, “puts it correct—why didn’t you?”
“Well, she has a better husband by this time, I hope,” returns the
trooper. “Anyhow, here I stand, this present day, not married to Joe
Pouch’s widder. What shall I do? You see all I have got about me. It’s
not mine; it’s yours. Give the word, and I’ll sell off every morsel. If I
could have hoped it would have brought in nearly the sum wanted,
I’d have sold all long ago. Don’t believe that I’ll leave you or yours in
the lurch, Mat. I’d sell myself first. I only wish,” says the trooper,
giving himself a disparaging blow in the chest, “that I knew of any
one who’d buy such a second-hand piece of old stores.”
“Old girl,” murmurs Mr. Bagnet, “give him another bit of my
mind.”
“George,” says the old girl, “you are not so much to be blamed, on
full consideration, except for ever taking this business without the
means.”
“And that was like me!” observes the penitent trooper, shaking his
head. “Like me, I know.”
“Silence! The old girl,” says Mr. Bagnet, “is correct—in her way of
giving my opinions—hear me out!”
“That was when you never ought to have asked for the security,
George, and when you never ought to have got it, all things consid-
ered. But what’s done can’t be undone. You are always an honourable
and straightforward fellow, as far as lays in your power, though a little
flighty. On the other hand, you can’t admit but what it’s natural in us
to be anxious with such a thing hanging over our heads. So forget and
forgive all round, George. Come! Forget and forgive all round!”
Mrs. Bagnet, giving him one of her honest hands and giving her
husband the other, Mr. George gives each of them one of his and
holds them while he speaks.
“I do assure you both, there’s nothing I wouldn’t do to discharge this
obligation. But whatever I have been able to scrape together has gone
every two months in keeping it up. We have lived plainly enough here,
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Phil and I. But the gallery don’t quite do what was expected of it, and it’s
not—in short, it’s not the mint. It was wrong in me to take it? Well, so
it was. But I was in a manner drawn into that step, and I thought it
might steady me, and set me up, and you’ll try to overlook my having
such expectations, and upon my soul, I am very much obliged to you,
and very much ashamed of myself.” With these concluding words, Mr.
George gives a shake to each of the hands he holds, and relinquishing
them, backs a pace or two in a broad-chested, upright attitude, as if he
had made a final confession and were immediately going to be shot with
all military honours.
“George, hear me out!” says Mr. Bagnet, glancing at his wife. “Old
girl, go on!”
Mr. Bagnet, being in this singular manner heard out, has merely to
observe that the letter must be attended to without any delay, that it
is advisable that George and he should immediately wait on Mr.
Smallweed in person, and that the primary object is to save and hold
harmless Mr. Bagnet, who had none of the money. Mr. George,
entirely assenting, puts on his hat and prepares to march with Mr.
Bagnet to the enemy’s camp.
“Don’t you mind a woman’s hasty word, George,” says Mrs.
Bagnet, patting him on the shoulder. “I trust my old Lignum to you,
and I am sure you’ll bring him through it.”
The trooper returns that this is kindly said and that he will bring
Lignum through it somehow. Upon which Mrs. Bagnet, with her
cloak, basket, and umbrella, goes home, bright-eyed again, to the
rest of her family, and the comrades sally forth on the hopeful errand
of mollifying Mr. Smallweed.
Whether there are two people in England less likely to come satisfac-
torily out of any negotiation with Mr. Smallweed than Mr. George and
Mr. Matthew Bagnet may be very reasonably questioned. Also, not-
withstanding their martial appearance, broad square shoulders, and heavy
tread, whether there are within the same limits two more simple and
unaccustomed children in all the Smallweedy affairs of life. As they pro-
ceed with great gravity through the streets towards the region of Mount
Pleasant, Mr. Bagnet, observing his companion to be thoughtful, con-
siders it a friendly part to refer to Mrs. Bagnet’s late sally.
“George, you know the old girl—she’s as sweet and as mild as
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milk. But touch her on the children—or myself—and she’s off like
gunpowder.”
“It does her credit, Mat!”
“George,” says Mr. Bagnet, looking straight before him, “the old
girl—can’t do anything—that don’t do her credit. More or less. I
never say so. Discipline must he maintained.”
“She’s worth her weight in gold,” says the trooper.
“In gold?” says Mr. Bagnet. “I’ll tell you what. The old girl’s
weight—is twelve stone six. Would I take that weight—in any
metal—for the old girl? No. Why not? Because the old girl’s metal is
far more precious—-than the preciousest metal. And she’s all metal!”
“You are right, Mat!”
“When she took me—and accepted of the ring—she ‘listed under
me and the children—heart and head, for life. She’s that earnest,”
says Mr. Bagnet, “and true to her colours—that, touch us with a
finger—and she turns out—and stands to her arms. If the old girl
fires wide—once in a way—at the call of duty—look over it, George.
For she’s loyal!”
“Why, bless her, Mat,” returns the trooper, “I think the higher of
her for it!”
“You are right!” says Mr. Bagnet with the warmest enthusiasm,
though without relaxing the rigidity of a single muscle. “Think as
high of the old girl—as the rock of Gibraltar—and still you’ll be
thinking low—of such merits. But I never own to it before her.
Discipline must be maintained.”
These encomiums bring them to Mount Pleasant and to Grand-
father Smallweed’s house. The door is opened by the perennial Judy,
who, having surveyed them from top to toe with no particular favour,
but indeed with a malignant sneer, leaves them standing there while
she consults the oracle as to their admission. The oracle may be in-
ferred to give consent from the circumstance of her returning with
the words on her honey lips that they can come in if they want to it.
Thus privileged, they come in and find Mr. Smallweed with his feet
in the drawer of his chair as if it were a paper foot-bath and Mrs.
Smallweed obscured with the cushion like a bird that is not to sing.
“My dear friend,” says Grandfather Smallweed with those two
lean affectionate arms of his stretched forth. “How de do? How de
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to be silent when the startled visitors look round, but whose chin has
received a recent toss, expressive of derision and contempt. Mr.
Bagnet’s gravity becomes yet more profound.
“But I think you asked me, Mr. George”—old Smallweed, who
all this time has had the pipe in his hand, is the speaker now—”I
think you asked me, what did the letter mean?”
“Why, yes, I did,” returns the trooper in his off-hand way, “but I
don’t care to know particularly, if it’s all correct and pleasant.”
Mr. Smallweed, purposely balking himself in an aim at the trooper’s
head, throws the pipe on the ground and breaks it to pieces.
“That’s what it means, my dear friend. I’ll smash you. I’ll
crumble you. I’ll powder you. Go to the devil!”
The two friends rise and look at one another. Mr. Bagnet’s gravity
has now attained its profoundest point.
“Go to the devil!” repeats the old man. “I’ll have no more of your
pipe-smokings and swaggerings. What? You’re an independent dra-
goon, too! Go to my lawyer (you remember where; you have been
there before) and show your independeuce now, will you? Come,
my dear friend, there’s a chance for you. Open the street door, Judy;
put these blusterers out! Call in help if they don’t go. Put ‘em out!”
He vociferates this so loudly that Mr. Bagnet, laying his hands on
the shoulders of his comrade before the latter can recover from his
amazement, gets him on the outside of the street door, which is
instantly slammed by the triumphant Judy. Utterly confounded, Mr.
George awhile stands looking at the knocker. Mr. Bagnet, in a per-
fect abyss of gravity, walks up and down before the little parlour
window like a sentry and looks in every time he passes, apparently
revolving something in his mind.
“Come, Mat,” says Mr. George when he has recovered himself,
“we must try the lawyer. Now, what do you think of this rascal?”
Mr. Bagnet, stopping to take a farewell look into the parlour, re-
plies with one shake of his head directed at the interior, “If my old
girl had been here—I’d have told him!” Having so discharged him-
self of the subject of his cogitations, he falls into step and marches
off with the trooper, shoulder to shoulder.
When they present themselves in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, Mr.
Tulkinghorn is engaged and not to be seen. He is not at all willing to
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see them, for when they have waited a full hour, and the clerk, on his
bell being rung, takes the opportunity of mentioning as much, he
brings forth no more encouraging message than that Mr. Tulkinghorn
has nothing to say to them and they had better not wait. They do
wait, however, with the perseverance of military tactics, and at last
the bell rings again and the client in possession comes out of Mr.
Tulkinghorn’s room.
The client is a handsome old lady, no other than Mrs. Rouncewell,
housekeeper at Chesney Wold. She comes out of the sanctuary with
a fair old-fashioned curtsy and softly shuts the door. She is treated
with some distinction there, for the clerk steps out of his pew to
show her through the outer office and to let her out. The old lady is
thanking him for his attention when she observes the comrades in
waiting.
“I beg your pardon, sir, but I think those gentlemen are military?”
The clerk referring the question to them with his eye, and Mr.
George not turning round from the almanac over the fire-place. Mr.
Bagnet takes upon himself to reply, “Yes, ma’am. Formerly.”
“I thought so. I was sure of it. My heart warms, gentlemen, at the
sight of you. It always does at the sight of such. God bless you,
gentlemen! You’ll excuse an old woman, but I had a son once who
went for a soldier. A fine handsome youth he was, and good in his
bold way, though some people did disparage him to his poor mother.
I ask your pardon for troubling you, sir. God bless you, gentlemen!”
“Same to you, ma’am!” returns Mr. Bagnet with right good will.
There is something very touching in the earnestness of the old
lady’s voice and in the tremble that goes through her quaint old fig-
ure. But Mr. George is so occupied with the almanac over the fire-
place (calculating the coming months by it perhaps) that he does not
look round until she has gone away and the door is closed upon her.
“George,” Mr. Bagnet gruffly whispers when he does turn from
the almanac at last. “Don’t be cast down! ‘Why, soldiers, why—should
we be melancholy, boys?’ Cheer up, my hearty!”
The clerk having now again gone in to say that they are still there
and Mr. Tulkinghorn being heard to return with some irascibility,
“Let ‘em come in then!” they pass into the great room with the painted
ceiling and find him standing before the fire.
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“Now, you men, what do you want? Sergeant, I told you the last
time I saw you that I don’t desire your company here.”
Sergeant replies—dashed within the last few minutes as to his usual
manner of speech, and even as to his usual carriage—that he has re-
ceived this letter, has been to Mr. Smallweed about it, and has been
referred there.
“I have nothing to say to you,” rejoins Mr. Tulkinghorn. “If you
get into debt, you must pay your debts or take the consequences.
You have no occasion to come here to learn that, I suppose?”
Sergeant is sorry to say that he is not prepared with the money.
“Very well! Then the other man—this man, if this is he—must
pay it for you.”
Sergeant is sorry to add that the other man is not prepared with
the money either.
“Very well! Then you must pay it between you or you must both
be sued for it and both suffer. You have had the money and must
refund it. You are not to pocket other people’s pounds, shillings, and
pence and escape scot-free.”
The lawyer sits down in his easy-chair and stirs the fire. Mr. George
hopes he will have the goodness to—
“I tell you, sergeant, I have nothing to say to you. I don’t like your
associates and don’t want you here. This matter is not at all in my
course of practice and is not in my office. Mr. Smallweed is good
enough to offer these affairs to me, but they are not in my way. You
must go to Melchisedech’s in Clifford’s Inn.”
“I must make an apology to you, sir,” says Mr. George, “for press-
ing myself upon you with so little encouragement—which is almost
as unpleasant to me as it can be to you—but would you let me say a
private word to you?”
Mr. Tulkinghorn rises with his hands in his pockets and walks into
one of the window recesses. “Now! I have no time to waste.” In the
midst of his perfect assumption of indifference, he directs a sharp
look at the trooper, taking care to stand with his own back to the
light and to have the other with his face towards it.
“Well, sir,” says Mr. George, “this man with me is the other party
implicated in this unfortunate affair—nominally, only nominally—
and my sole object is to prevent his getting into trouble on my ac-
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CHAPTER XXXV
Esther’s Narrative
I lay ill through several weeks, and the usual tenor of my life
became like an old remembrance. But this was not the effect of time
so much as of the change in all my habits made by the helplessness
and inaction of a sick-room. Before I had been confined to it many
days, everything else seemed to have retired into a remote distance
where there was little or no separation between the various stages of
my life which had been really divided by years. In falling ill, I seemed
to have crossed a dark lake and to have left all my experiences, mingled
together by the great distance, on the healthy shore.
My housekeeping duties, though at first it caused me great anxiety
to think that they were unperformed, were soon as far off as the
oldest of the old duties at Greenleaf or the summer afternoons when
I went home from school with my portfolio under my arm, and my
childish shadow at my side, to my godmother’s house. I had never
known before how short life really was and into how small a space
the mind could put it.
While I was very ill, the way in which these divisions of time be-
came confused with one another distressed my mind exceedingly. At
once a child, an elder girl, and the little woman I had been so happy as,
I was not only oppressed by cares and difficulties adapted to each sta-
tion, but by the great perplexity of endlessly trying to reconcile them.
I suppose that few who have not been in such a condition can quite
understand what I mean or what painful unrest arose from this source.
For the same reason I am almost afraid to hint at that time in my
disorder—it seemed one long night, but I believe there were both
nights and days in it—when I laboured up colossal staircases, ever
striving to reach the top, and ever turned, as I have seen a worm in a
garden path, by some obstruction, and labouring again. I knew per-
fectly at intervals, and I think vaguely at most times, that I was in my
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bed; and I talked with Charley, and felt her touch, and knew her very
well; yet I would find myself complaining, “Oh, more of these never-
ending stairs, Charley—more and more—piled up to the sky’, I
think!” and labouring on again.
Dare I hint at that worse time when, strung together somewhere
in great black space, there was a flaming necklace, or ring, or starry
circle of some kind, of which I was one of the beads! And when my
only prayer was to be taken off from the rest and when it was such
inexplicable agony and misery to be a part of the dreadful thing?
Perhaps the less I say of these sick experiences, the less tedious and
the more intelligible I shall be. I do not recall them to make others
unhappy or because I am now the least unhappy in remembering
them. It may be that if we knew more of such strange afflictions we
might be the better able to alleviate their intensity.
The repose that succeeded, the long delicious sleep, the blissful
rest, when in my weakness I was too calm to have any care for myself
and could have heard (or so I think now) that I was dying, with no
other emotion than with a pitying love for those I left behind—this
state can be perhaps more widely understood. I was in this state when
I first shrunk from the light as it twinkled on me once more, and
knew with a boundless joy for which no words are rapturous enough
that I should see again.
I had heard my Ada crying at the door, day and night; I had heard her
calling to me that I was cruel and did not love her; I had heard her
praying and imploring to be let in to nurse and comfort me and to leave
my bedside no more; but I had only said, when I could speak, “Never,
my sweet girl, never!” and I had over and over again reminded Charley
that she was to keep my darling from the room whether I lived or died.
Charley had been true to me in that time of need, and with her little
hand and her great heart had kept the door fast.
But now, my sight strengthening and the glorious light coming
every day more fully and brightly on me, I could read the letters that
my dear wrote to me every morning and evening and could put them
to my lips and lay my cheek upon them with no fear of hurting her.
I could see my little maid, so tender and so careful, going about the
two rooms setting everything in order and speaking cheerfully to
Ada from the open window again. I could understand the stillness in
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the house and the thoughtfulness it expressed on the part of all those
who had always been so good to me. I could weep in the exquisite
felicity of my heart and be as happy in my weakness as ever I had
been in my strength.
By and by my strength began to be restored. Instead of lying, with
so strange a calmness, watching what was done for me, as if it were
done for some one else whom I was quietly sorry for, I helped it a
little, and so on to a little more and much more, until I became
useful to myself, and interested, and attached to life again.
How well I remember the pleasant afternoon when I was raised in
bed with pillows for the first time to enjoy a great tea-drinking with
Charley! The little creature—sent into the world, surely, to minister
to the weak and sick—was so happy, and so busy, and stopped so
often in her preparations to lay her head upon my bosom, and fondle
me, and cry with joyful tears she was so glad, she was so glad, that I
was obliged to say, “Charley, if you go on in this way, I must lie
down again, my darling, for I am weaker than I thought I was!” So
Charley became as quiet as a mouse and took her bright face here and
there across and across the two rooms, out of the shade into the
divine sunshine, and out of the sunshine into
the shade, while I watched her peacefully. When all her preparations
were concluded and the pretty tea-table with its little delicacies to
tempt me, and its white cloth, and its flowers, and everything so
lovingly and beautifully arranged for me by Ada downstairs, was
ready at the bedside, I felt sure I was steady enough to say something
to Charley that was not new to my thoughts.
First I complimented Charley on the room, and indeed it was so
fresh and airy, so spotless and neat, that I could scarce believe I had
been lying there so long. This delighted Charley, and her face was
brighter than before.
“Yet, Charley,” said I, looking round, “I miss something, surely,
that I am accustomed to?”
Poor little Charley looked round too and pretended to shake her
head as if there were nothing absent.
“Are the pictures all as they used to be?” I asked her.
“Every one of them, miss,” said Charley.
“And the furniture, Charley?”
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the morrow and accept his offer. It was a most agreeable one to me,
for all the places I could have thought of, I should have liked to go to
none so well as Chesney Wold.
“Now, little housewife,” said my guardian, looking at his watch,
“I was strictly timed before I came upstairs, for you must not be tired
too soon; and my time has waned away to the last minute. I have one
other petition. Little Miss Flite, hearing a rumour that you were ill,
made nothing of walking down here—twenty miles, poor soul, in a
pair of dancing shoes—to inquire. It was heaven’s mercy we were at
home, or she would have walked back again.”
The old conspiracy to make me happy! Everybody seemed to be
in it!
“Now, pet,” said my guardian, “if it would not be irksome to you
to admit the harmless little creature one afternoon before you save
Boythorn’s otherwise devoted house from demolition, I believe you
would make her prouder and better pleased with herself than I—
though my eminent name is Jarndyce—could do in a lifetime.”
I have no doubt he knew there would be something in the simple
image of the poor afflicted creature that would fall like a gentle lesson
on my mind at that time. I felt it as he spoke to me. I could not tell
him heartily enough how ready I was to receive her. I had always pitied
her, never so much as now. I had always been glad of my little power to
soothe her under her calamity, but never, never, half so glad before.
We arranged a time for Miss Flite to come out by the coach and
share my early dinner. When my guardian left me, I turned my face
away upon my couch and prayed to be forgiven if I, surrounded by
such blessings, had magnified to myself the little trial that I had to
undergo. The childish prayer of that old birthday when I had aspired
to be industrious, contented, and true-hearted and to do good to
some one and win some love to myself if I could came back into my
mind with a reproachful sense of all the happiness I had
since enjoyed and all the affectionate hearts that had been turned
towards me. If I were weak now, what had I profited by those mer-
cies? I repeated the old childish prayer in its old childish words and
found that its old peace had not departed from it.
My guardian now came every day. In a week or so more I could
walk about our rooms and hold long talks with Ada from behind
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the window-curtain. Yet I never saw her, for I had not as yet the
courage to look at the dear face, though I could have done so easily
without her seeing me.
On the appointed day Miss Flite arrived. The poor little creature
ran into my room quite forgetful of her usual dignity, and crying
from her very heart of hearts, “My dear Fitz Jarndyce!” fell upon my
neck and kissed me twenty times.
“Dear me!” said she, putting her hand into her reticule, “I have
nothing here but documents, my dear Fitz Jarndyce; I must borrow
a pocket handkerchief.”
Charley gave her one, and the good creature certainly made use of
it, for she held it to her eyes with both hands and sat so, shedding
tears for the next ten minutes.
“With pleasure, my dear Fitz Jarndyce,” she was careful to explain. “Not the
least pain. Pleasure to see you well again. Pleasure at having the honour of being
admitted to see you. I am so much fonder of you, my love, than of the
Chancellor. Though I do attend court regularly. By the by, my dear, mention-
ing pocket handkerchiefs—”
Miss Flite here looked at Charley, who had been to meet her at the
place where the coach stopped. Charley glanced at me and looked
unwilling to pursue the suggestion.
“Ve-ry right!” said Miss Flite, “Ve-ry correct. Truly! Highly
indiscreet of me to mention it; but my dear Miss Fitz Jarndyce, I am
afraid I am at times (between ourselves, you wouldn’t think it) a
little—rambling you know,” said Miss Flite, touching her forehead.
“Nothing more,”
“What were you going to tell me?” said I, smiling, for I saw she
wanted to go on. “You have roused my curiosity, and now you must
gratify it.”
Miss Flite looked at Charley for advice in this important crisis,
who said, “If you please, ma’am, you had better tell then,” and therein
gratified Miss Flite beyond measure.
“So sagacious, our young friend,” said she to me in her mysterious
way. “Diminutive. But ve-ry sagacious! Well, my dear, it’s a pretty
anecdote. Nothing more. Still I think it charming. Who should fol-
low us down the road from the coach, my dear, but a poor person in
a very ungenteel bonnet—”
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“Draw,” returned Miss Flite. “Draw people on, my dear. Draw peace
out of them. Sense out of them. Good looks out of them. Good quali-
ties out of them. I have felt them even drawing my rest away in the
night. Cold and glittering devils!”
She tapped me several times upon the arm and nodded good-
humouredly as if she were anxious I should understand that I had no
cause to fear her, though she spoke so gloomily, and confided these
awful secrets to me.
“Let me see,” said she. “I’ll tell you my own case. Before they ever drew
me—before I had ever seen them—what was it I used to do? Tambourine
playing? No. Tambour work. I and my sister worked at tambour work.
Our father and our brother had a builder’s business. We all lived together.
Ve-ry respectably, my dear! First, our father was drawn—slowly. Home
was drawn with him. In a few years he was a fierce, sour, angry bankrupt
without a kind word or a kind look for any one. He had been so different,
Fitz Jarndyce. He was drawn to a debtors’ prison. There he died. Then our
brother was drawn—swiftly—to drunkenness. And rags. And death. Then
my sister was drawn. Hush! Never ask to what! Then I was ill and in
misery, and heard, as I had often heard before, that this was all the work of
Chancery. When I got better, I went to look at the monster. And then I
found out how it was, and I was drawn to stay there.”
Having got over her own short narrative, in the delivery of which
she had spoken in a low, strained voice, as if the shock were fresh
upon her, she gradually resumed her usual air of amiable importance.
“You don’t quite credit me, my dear! Well, well! You will, some
day. I am a little rambling. But I have noticed. I have seen many new
faces come, unsuspicious, within the influence of the mace and seal
in these many years. As my father’s came there. As my brother’s. As
my sister’s. As my own. I hear Conversation Kenge and the rest of
them say to the new faces, ‘Here’s little Miss Flite. Oh, you are new
here; and you must come and be presented to little Miss Flite!’ Ve-ry
good. Proud I am sure to have the honour! And we all laugh. But,
Fitz Jarndyce, I know what will happen. I know, far better than they
do, when the attraction has begun. I know the signs, my dear. I saw
them begin in Gridley. And I saw them end. Fitz Jarndyce, my love,”
speaking low again,
“I saw them beginning in our friend the ward in Jarndyce. Let some
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naked people in his spare clothes, took the lead, showed them what to
do, governed them, tended the sick, buried the dead, and brought the
poor survivors safely off at last! My dear, the poor emaciated creatures
all but worshipped him. They fell down at his feet when they got to
the land and blessed him. The whole country rings with it. Stay! Where’s
my bag of documents? I have got it there, and you shall read it, you
shall read it!”
And I did read all the noble history, though very slowly and im-
perfectly then, for my eyes were so dimmed that I could not see the
words, and I cried so much that I was many times obliged to lay
down the long account she had cut out of the newspaper. I felt so
triumphant ever to have known the man who had done such gener-
ous and gallant deeds, I felt such glowing exultation in his renown, I
so admired and loved what he had done, that I envied the storm-
worn people who had fallen at his feet and blessed him as their pre-
server. I could myself have kneeled down then, so far away, and blessed
him in my rapture that he should be so truly good and brave. I felt
that no one—mother, sister, wife—could honour him more than I.
I did, indeed!
My poor little visitor made me a present of the account, and when
as the evening began to close in she rose to take her leave, lest she
should miss the coach by which she was to return, she was still full of
the shipwreck, which I had not yet sufflciently composed myself to
understand in all its details.
“My dear,” said she as she carefully folded up her scarf and gloves,
“my brave physician ought to have a title bestowed upon him. And
no doubt he will. You are of that opinlon?”
That he well deserved one, yes. That he would ever have one, no.
“Why not, Fitz Jarndyce?” she asked rather sharply.
I said it was not the custom in England to confer titles on men
distinguished by peaceful services, however good and great, unless
occasionally when they consisted of the accumulation of some very
large amount of money.
“Why, good gracious,” said Miss Flite, “how can you say that?
Surely you know, my dear, that all the greatest ornaments of En-
gland in knowledge, imagination, active humanity, and improve-
ment of every sort are added to its nobility! Look round you, my
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dear, and consider. you must be rambling a little now, I think, if you
don’t know that this is the great reason why titles will always last in
the land!”
I am afraid she believed what she said, for there were moments
when she was very mad indeed.
And now I must part with the little secret I have thus far tried to
keep. I had thought, sometimes, that Mr. Woodcourt loved me and
that if he had been richer he would perhaps have told me that he
loved me before he went away. I had thought, sometimes, that if he
had done so, I should have been glad of it. But how much better it
was now that this had never happened! What should I have suffered
if I had had to write to him and tell him that the poor face he had
known as mine was quite gone from me and that I freely released
him from his bondage to one whom he had never seen!
Oh, it was so much better as it was! With a great pang mercifully
spared me, I could take back to my heart my childish prayer to be all
he had so brightly shown himself; and there was nothing to be un-
done: no chain for me to break or for him to drag; and I could go,
please God, my lowly way along the path of duty, and he could go
his nobler way upon its broader road; and though we were apart
upon the journey, I might aspire to meet him, unselfishly, inno-
cently, better far than he had thought me when I found some favour
in his eyes, at the journey’s end.
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CHAPTER XXXVI
Chesney Wold
CHARLEY AND I DID NOT SET OFF alone upon our expedition into
Lincolnshire. My guardian had made up his mind not to lose sight of
me until I was safe in Mr. Boythorn’s house, so he accompanied us,
and we were two days upon the road. I found every breath of air, and
every scent, and every flower and leaf and blade of grass, and every
passing cloud, and everything in nature, more beautiful and wonderful
to me than I had ever found it yet. This was my first gain from my
illness. How little I had lost, when the wide world was so full of de-
light for me.
My guardian intending to go back immediately, we appointed, on
our way down, a day when my dear girl should come. I wrote her a
letter, of which he took charge, and he left us within half an hour of
our arrival at our destination, on a delightful evening in the early
summer-time.
If a good fairy had built the house for me with a wave of her
wand, and I had been a princess and her favoured god-child, I could
not have been more considered in it. So many preparations were
made for me and such an endearing remembrance was shown of all
my little tastes and likings that I could have sat down, overcome, a
dozen times before I had revisited half the rooms. I did better than
that, however, by showing them all to Charley instead. Charley’s
delight calmed mine; and after we had had a walk in the garden, and
Charley had exhausted her whole vocabulary of admiring expressions,
I was as tranquilly happy as I ought to have been. It was a great
comfort to be able to say to myself after tea, “Esther, my dear, I think
you are quite sensible enough to sit down now and write a note of
thanks to your host.” He had left a note of welcome for me, as sunny
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as his own face, and had confided his bird to my care, which I knew
to be his highest mark of confidence. Accordingly I wrote a little
note to him in London, telling him how all his favourite plants and
trees were looking, and how the most astonishing of birds had chirped
the honours of the house to me in the most hospitable manner, and
how, after singing on my shoulder, to the inconceivable rapture of
my little maid, he was then at roost in the usual corner of his cage,
but whether dreaming or no I could not report. My note finished
and sent off to the post, I made myself very busy in unpacking and
arranging; and I sent Charley to bed in good time and told her I
should want her no more that night.
For I had not yet looked in the glass and had never asked to have
my own restored to me. I knew this to be a weakness which must be
overcome, but I had always said to myself that I would begin afresh
when I got to where I now was. Therefore I had wanted to be alone,
and therefore I said, now alone, in my own room, “Esther, if you are
to be happy, if you are to have any right to pray to be true-hearted,
you must keep your word, my dear.” I was quite resolved to keep it,
but I sat down for a little while first to reflect upon all my blessings.
And then I said my prayers and thought a little more.
My hair had not been cut off, though it had been in danger more
than once. It was long and thick. I let it down, and shook it out, and
went up to the glass upon the dressing-table. There was a little mus-
lin curtain drawn across it. I drew it back and stood for a moment
looking through such a veil of my own hair that I could see nothing
else. Then I put my hair aside and looked at the reflection in the
mirror, encouraged by seeing how placidly it looked at me. I was
very much changed—oh, very, very much. At first my face was so
strange to me that I think I should have put my hands before it and
started back but for the encouragement I have mentioned. Very soon
it became more familiar, and then I knew the extent of the alteration
in it better than I had done at first. It was not like what I had ex-
pected, but I had expected nothing definite, and I dare say anything
definite would have surprised me.
I had never been a beauty and had never thought myself one, but I
had been very different from this. It was all gone now. Heaven was
so good to me that I could let it go with a few not bitter tears and
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could stand there arranging my hair for the night quite thankfully.
One thing troubled me, and I considered it for a long time before
I went to sleep. I had kept Mr. Woodcourt’s flowers. When they
were withered I had dried them and put them in a book that I was
fond of. Nobody knew this, not even Ada. I was doubtful whether I
had a right to preserve what he had sent to one so different—whether
it was generous towards him to do it. I wished to be generous to
him, even in the secret depths of my heart, which he would never
know, because I could have loved him—could have been devoted to
him. At last I came to the conclusion that I might keep them if I
treasured them only as a remembrance of what was irrevocably past
and gone, never to be looked back on any more, in any other light. I
hope this may not seem trivial. I was very much in earnest.
I took care to be up early in the morning and to be before the glass
when Charley came in on tiptoe.
“Dear, dear, miss!” cried Charley, starting. “Is that you?”
“Yes, Charley,” said I, quietly putting up my hair. “And I am very
well indeed, and very happy.”
I saw it was a weight off Charley’s mind, but it was a greater
weight off mine. I knew the worst now and was composed to it. I
shall not conceal, as I go on, the weaknesses I could not quite con-
quer, but they always passed from me soon and the happier frame of
mind stayed by me faithfully.
Wishing to be fully re-established in my strength and my good
spirits before Ada came, I now laid down a little series of plans with
Charley for being in the fresh air all day long. We were to be out
before breakfast, and were to dine early, and were to be out again be-
fore and after dinner, and were to talk in the garden after tea, and were
to go to rest betimes, and were to climb every hill and explore every
road, lane, and field in the neighbourhood. As to restoratives and
strengthening delicacies, Mr. Boythorn’s good housekeeper was for ever
trotting about with something to eat or drink in her hand; I could not
even be heard of as resting in the park but she would come trotting
after me with a basket, her cheerful face shining with a lecture on the
importance of frequent nourishment. Then there was a pony expressly
for my riding, a chubby pony with a short neck and a mane all over his
eyes who could canter—when he would—so easily and quietly that he
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Wold where a seat had been erected commanding a lovely view. The
wood had been cleared and opened to improve this point of sight,
and the bright sunny landscape beyond was so beautiful that I rested
there at least once every day. A picturesque part of the Hall, called the
Ghost’s Walk, was seen to advantage from this higher ground; and
the startling name, and the old legend in the Dedlock family which I
had heard from Mr. Boythorn accounting for it, mingled with the
view and gave it something of a mysterious interest in addition to its
real charms. There was a bank here, too, which was a famous one for
violets; and as it was a daily delight of Charley’s to gather wild flow-
ers, she took as much to the spot as I did.
It would be idle to inquire now why I never went close to the
house or never went inside it. The family were not there, I had heard
on my arrival, and were not expected. I was far from being incurious
or uninterested about the building; on the contrary, I often sat in this
place wondering how the rooms ranged and whether any echo like a
footstep really did resound at times, as the story said, upon the lonely
Ghost’s Walk. The indefinable feeling with which Lady Dedlock
had impressed me may have had some influence in keeping me from
the house even when she was absent. I am not sure. Her face and
figure were associated with it, naturally; but I cannot say that they
repelled me from it, though something did. For whatever reason or
no reason, I had never once gone near it, down to the day at which
my story now arrives.
I was resting at my favourite point after a long ramble, and Char-
ley was gathering violets at a little distance from me. I had been
looking at the Ghost’s Walk lying in a deep shade of masonry afar off
and picturing to myself the female shape that was said to haunt it
when I became aware of a figure approaching through the wood.
The perspective was so long and so darkened by leaves, and the shad-
ows of the branches on the ground made it so much more intricate
to the eye, that at first I could not discern what figure it was. By little
and little it revealed itself to be a woman’s—a lady’s—Lady Dedlock’s.
She was alone and coming to where I sat with a much quicker step, I
observed to my surprise, than was usual with her.
I was fluttered by her being unexpectedly so near (she was almost
within speaking distance before I knew her) and would have risen to
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I did not dare to linger or to look up, but I passed before the
terrace garden with its fragrant odours, and its broad walks, and its
well-kept beds and smooth turf; and I saw how beautiful and grave it
was, and how the old stone balustrades and parapets, and wide flights
of shallow steps, were seamed by time and weather; and how the
trained moss and ivy grew about them, and around the old stone
pedestal of the sun-dial; and I heard the fountain falling. Then the
way went by long lines of dark windows diversified by turreted tow-
ers and porches of eccentric shapes, where old stone lions and gro-
tesque monsters bristled outside dens of shadow and snarled at the
evening gloom over the escutcheons they held in their grip. Thence
the path wound underneath a gateway, and through a court-yard
where the principal entrance was (I hurried quickly on), and by the
stables where none but deep voices seemed to be, whether in the
murmuring of the wind through the strong mass of ivy holding to a
high red wall, or in the low complaining of the weathercock, or in
the barking of the dogs, or in the slow striking of a clock. So, en-
countering presently a sweet smell of limes, whose rustling I could
hear, I turned with the turning of the path to the south front, and
there above me were the balustrades of the Ghost’s Walk and one
lighted window that might be my mother’s.
The way was paved here, like the terrace overhead, and my foot-
steps from being noiseless made an echoing sound upon the flags.
Stopping to look at nothing, but seeing all I did see as I went, I was
passing quickly on, and in a few moments should have passed the
lighted window, when my echoing footsteps brought it suddenly
into my mind that there was a dreadful truth in the legend of the
Ghost’s Walk, that it was I who was to bring calamity upon the
stately house and that my warning feet were haunting it even then.
Seized with an augmented terror of myself which turned me cold, I
ran from myself and everything, retraced the way by which I had
come, and never paused until I had gained the lodge-gate, and the
park lay sullen and black behind me.
Not before I was alone in my own room for the night and had
again been dejected and unhappy there did I begin to know how
wrong and thankless this state was. But from my darling who was
coming on the morrow, I found a joyful letter, full of such loving
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Oh, how happy I was, down upon the floor, with my sweet beau-
tiful girl down upon the floor too, holding my scarred face to her
lovely cheek, bathing it with tears and kisses, rocking me to and fro
like a child, calling me by every tender name that she could think of,
and pressing me to her faithful heart.
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CHAPTER XXXVII
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been there a bright week, as I recollect the time, when one evening
after we had finished helping the gardener in watering his flowers,
and just as the candles were lighted, Charley, appearing with a very
important air behind Ada’s chair, beckoned me mysteriously out of
the room.
“Oh! If you please, miss,” said Charley in a whisper, with her eyes
at their roundest and largest. “You’re wanted at the Dedlock Arms.”
“Why, Charley,” said I, “who can possibly want me at the public-
house?”
“I don’t know, miss,” returned Charley, putting her head forward
and folding her hands tight upon the band of her little apron, which
she always did in the enjoyment of anything mysterious or confiden-
tial, “but it’s a gentleman, miss, and his compliments, and will you
please to come without saying anything about it.”
“Whose compliments, Charley?”
“His’n, miss,” returned Charley, whose grammatical education was
advancing, but not very rapidly.
“And how do you come to be the messenger, Charley?”
“I am not the messenger, if you please, miss,” returned my little
maid. “It was W. Grubble, miss.”
“And who is W. Grubble, Charley?”
“Mister Grubble, miss,” returned Charley. “Don’t you know, miss?
The Dedlock Arms, by W. Grubble,” which Charley delivered as if
she were slowly spelling out the sign.
“Aye? The landlord, Charley?”
“Yes, miss. If you please, miss, his wife is a beautiful woman, but
she broke her ankle, and it never joined. And her brother’s the sawyer
that was put in the cage, miss, and they expect he’ll drink himself to
death entirely on beer,” said Charley.
Not knowing what might be the matter, and being easily appre-
hensive now, I thought it best to go to this place by myself. I bade
Charley be quick with my bonnet and veil and my shawl, and having
put them on, went away down the little hilly street, where I was as
much at home as in Mr. Boythorn’s garden.
Mr. Grubble was standing in his shirt-sleeves at the door of his very
clean little tavern waiting for me. He lifted off his hat with both hands
when he saw me coming, and carrying it so, as if it were an iron vessel
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(it looked as heavy), preceded me along the sanded passage to his best
parlour, a neat carpeted room with more plants in it than were quite
convenient, a coloured print of Queen Caroline, several shells, a good
many tea-trays, two stuffed and dried fish in glass cases, and either a
curious egg or a curious pumpkin (but I don’t know which, and I
doubt if many people did) hanging from his ceiling. I knew Mr. Grubble
very well by sight, from his often standing at his door. A pleasant-
looking, stoutish, middle-aged man who never seemed to consider
himself cozily dressed for his own fire-side without his hat and top-
boots, but who never wore a coat except at church.
He snuffed the candle, and backing away a little to see how it
looked, backed out of the room—unexpectedly to me, for I was
going to ask him by whom he had been sent. The door of the oppo-
site parlour being then opened, I heard some voices, familiar in my
ears I thought, which stopped. A quick light step approached the
room in which I was, and who should stand before me but Richard!
“My dear Esther!” he said. “My best friend!” And he really was so
warm-hearted and earnest that in the first surprise and pleasure of his
brotherly greeting I could scarcely find breath to tell him that Ada
was well.
“Answering my very thoughts—always the same dear girl!” said Rich-
ard, leading me to a chair and seating himself beside me.
I put my veil up, but not quite.
“Always the same dear girl!” said Richard just as heartily as before.
I put up my veil altogether, and laying my hand on Richard’s sleeve
and looking in his face, told him how much I thanked him for his
kind welcome and how greatly I rejoiced to see him, the more so
because of the determination I had made in my illness, which I now
conveyed to him.
“My love,” said Richard, “there is no one with whom I have a
greater wish to talk than you, for I want you to understand me.”
“And I want you, Richard,” said I, shaking my head, “to under-
stand some one else.”
“Since you refer so immediately to John Jarndyce,” said Richard,
“—I suppose you mean him?”
“Of course I do.”
“Then I may say at once that I am glad of it, because it is on that
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say his sordid expenses—but thrice his weight in gold,” said Richard.
“He is such a cheery fellow. No worldliness about him. Fresh and
green-hearted!”
I certainly did not see the proof of Mr. Skimpole’s worldliness in
his having his expenses paid by Richard, but I made no remark about
that. Indeed, he came in and turned our conversation. He was charmed
to see me, said he had been shedding delicious tears of joy and sym-
pathy at intervals for six weeks on my account, had never been so
happy as in hearing of my progress, began to understand the mixture
of good and evil in the world now, felt that he appreciated health the
more when somebody else was ill, didn’t know but what it might be
in the scheme of things that A should squint to make B happier in
looking straight or that C should carry a wooden leg to make D
better satisfied with his flesh and blood in a silk stocking.
“My dear Miss Summerson, here is our friend Richard,” said Mr.
Skimpole, “full of the brightest visions of the future, which he evokes
out of the darkness of Chancery. Now that’s delightful, that’s
inspiriting, that’s full of poetry! In old times the woods and solitudes
were made joyous to the shepherd by the imaginary piping and danc-
ing of Pan and the nymphs. This present shepherd, our pastoral Ri-
chard, brightens the dull Inns of Court by making Fortune and her
train sport through them to the melodious notes of a judgment from
the bench. That’s very pleasant, you know! Some
ill-conditioned growling fellow may say to me, ‘What’s the use of
these legal and equitable abuses? How do you defend them?’ I reply,
‘My growling friend, I don’t defend them, but they are very agreeable
to me. There is a shepherd—youth, a friend of mine, who trans-
mutes them into something highly fascinating to my simplicity. I
don’t say it is for this that they exist—for I am a child among you
worldly grumblers, and not called upon to account to you or myself
for anything—but it may be so.’”
I began seriously to think that Richard could scarcely have found a
worse friend than this. It made me uneasy that at such a time when
he most required some right principle and purpose he should have
this captivating looseness and putting-off of everything, this airy dis-
pensing with all principle and purpose, at his elbow. I thought I
could understand how such a nature as my guardian’s, experienced in
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the world and forced to contemplate the miserable evasions and con-
tentions of the family misfortune, found an immense relief in Mr.
Skimpole’s avowal of his weaknesses and display of guileless candour;
but I could not satisfy myself that it was as artless as it seemed or that
it did not serve Mr. Skimpole’s idle turn quite as well as any other
part, and with less trouble.
They both walked back with me, and Mr. Skimpole leaving us
at the gate, I walked softly in with Richard and said, “Ada, my love,
I have brought a gentleman to visit you.” It was not difficult to
read the blushing, startled face. She loved him dearly, and he knew
it, and I knew it. It was a very transparent business, that meeting as
cousins only.
I almost mistrusted myself as growing quite wicked in my
suspicions, but I was not so sure that Richard loved her dearly.
He admired her very much—any one must have done that—and I
dare say would have renewed their youthful engagement with great
pride and ardour but that he knew how she would respect her prom-
ise to my guardian. Still I had a tormenting idea that the influence
upon him extended even here, that he was postponing his best truth
and earnestness in this as in all things until Jarndyce and Jarndyce
should be off his mind. Ah me! What Richard would have been
without that blight, I never shall know now!
He told Ada, in his most ingenuous way, that he had not come to
make any secret inroad on the terms she had accepted (rather too im-
plicitly and confidingly, he thought) from Mr. Jarndyce, that he had
come openly to see her and to see me and to justify himself for the
present terms on which he stood with Mr. Jarndyce. As the dear old
infant would be with us directly, he begged that I would make an
appointment for the morning, when he might set himself right through
the means of an unreserved conversation with me. I proposed to walk
with him in the park at seven o’clock, and this was arranged. Mr.
Skimpole soon afterwards appeared and made us merry for an hour.
He particularly requested to see little Coavinses (meaning Charley)
and told her, with a patriarchal air, that he had given her late father all
the business in his power and that if one of her little brothers would
make haste to get set up in the same profession, he hoped he should
still be able to put a good deal of employment in his way.
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ested to become lax about their interests; and people may die off,
and points may drag themselves out of memory, and many things
may smoothly happen that are convenient enough.”
I was so touched with pity for Richard that I could not reproach
him any more, even by a look. I remembered my guardian’s gentle-
ness towards his errors and with what perfect freedom from resent-
ment he had spoken of them.
“Esther,” Richard resumed, “you are not to suppose that I have
come here to make underhanded charges against John Jarndyce. I
have only come to justify myself. What I say is, it was all very well
and we got on very well while I was a boy, utterly regardless of this
same suit; but as soon as I began to take an interest in it and to look
into it, then it was quite another thing. Then John Jarndyce discov-
ers that Ada and I must break off and that if I don’t amend that very
objectionable course, I am not fit for her. Now, Esther, I don’t mean
to amend that very objectionable course: I will not hold John
Jarndyce’s favour on those unfair terms of compromise, which he
has no right to dictate. Whether it pleases him or displeases him, I
must maintain my rights and Ada’s. I have been thinking about it a
good deal, and this is the conclusion I have come to.”
Poor dear Richard! He had indeed been thinking about it a good
deal. His face, his voice, his manner, all showed that too plainly.
“So I tell him honourably (you are to know I have written to him
about all this) that we are at issue and that we had better be at issue
openly than covertly. I thank him for his goodwill and his protec-
tion, and he goes his road, and I go mine. The fact is, our roads are
not the same. Under one of the wills in dispute, I should take much
more than he. I don’t mean to say that it is the one to be established,
but there it is, and it has its chance.”
“I have not to learn from you, my dear Richard,” said I, “of your
letter. I had heard of it already without an offended or angry word.”
“Indeed?” replied Richard, softening. “I am glad I said he was an
honourable man, out of all this wretched affair. But I always say that
and have never doubted it. Now, my dear Esther, I know these views
of mine appear extremely harsh to you, and will to Ada when you
tell her what has passed between us. But if you had gone into the case
as I have, if you had only applied yourself to the papers as I did when
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John Jarndyce, but that I have this purpose and reason at my back. I
wish to represent myself to her through you, because she has a great
esteem and respect for her cousin John; and I know you will soften
the course I take, even though you disapprove of it; and—and in
short,” said Richard, who had been hesitating through these words,
“I—I don’t like to represent myself in this litigious, contentious,
doubting character to a confiding girl like Ada,”
I told him that he was more like himself in those latter words than
in anything he had said yet.
“Why,” acknowledged Richard, “that may be true enough, my love.
I rather feel it to be so. But I shall be able to give myself fair-play by
and by. I shall come all right again, then, don’t you be afraid.”
I asked him if this were all he wished me to tell Ada.
“Not quite,” said Richard. “I am bound not to withhold from her
that John Jarndyce answered my letter in his usual manner, address-
ing me as ‘My dear Rick,’ trying to argue me out of my opinions,
and telling me that they should make no difference in him. (All very
well of course, but not altering the case.) I also want Ada to know
that if I see her seldom just now, I am looking after her interests as
well as my own—we two being in the same boat exactly—and that I
hope she will not suppose from any flying rumours she may hear
that I am at all light-headed or imprudent; on the contrary, I am
always looking forward to the termination of the suit, and always
planning in that direction. Being of age now and having taken the
step I have taken, I consider myself free from any accountability to
John Jarndyce; but Ada being still a ward of the court, I don’t yet ask
her to renew our engagement. When she is free to act for herself, I
shall be myself once more and we shall both be in very different
worldly circumstances, I believe. If you tell her all this with the ad-
vantage of your considerate way, you will do me a very great and a
very kind service, my dear Esther; and I shall knock Jarndyce and
Jarndyce on the head with greater vigour. Of course I ask for no
secrecy at Bleak House.”
“Richard,” said I, “you place great confidence in me, but I fear you
will not take advice from me?”
“It’s impossible that I can on this subject, my dear girl. On any
other, readily.”
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As if there were any other in his life! As if his whole career and
character were not being dyed one colour!
“But I may ask you a question, Richard?”
“I think so,” said he, laughing. “I don’t know who may not, if you
may not.”
“You say, yourself, you are not leading a very settled life.”
“How can I, my dear Esther, with nothing settled!”
“Are you in debt again?”
“Why, of course I am,” said Richard, astonished at my simplicity.
“Is it of course?”
“My dear child, certainly. I can’t throw myself into an object so
completely without expense. You forget, or perhaps you don’t know,
that under either of the wills Ada and I take something. It’s only a
question between the larger sum and the smaller. I shall be within the
mark any way. Bless your heart, my excellent girl,” said Richard, quite
amused with me, “I shall be all right! I shall pull through, my dear!”
I felt so deeply sensible of the danger in which he stood that I tried,
in Ada’s name, in my guardian’s, in my own, by every fervent means
that I could think of, to warn him of it and to show him some of his
mistakes. He received everything I said with patience and gentleness,
but it all rebounded from him without taking the least effect. I could
not wonder at this after the reception his preoccupied mind had given
to my guardian’s letter, but I determined to try Ada’s influence yet.
So when our walk brought us round to the village again, and I
went home to breakfast, I prepared Ada for the account I was going
to give her and told her exactly what reason we had to dread that
Richard was losing himself and scattering his whole life to the winds.
It made her very unhappy, of course, though she had a far, far greater
reliance on his correcting his errors than I could have—which was so
natural and loving in my dear!—and she presently wrote him this
little letter:
My dearest cousin,
Esther has told me all you said to her this morning. I write this to
repeat most earnestly for myself all that she said to you and to let you
know how sure I am that you will sooner or later find our cousin
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John a pattern of truth, sincerity, and goodness, when you will deeply,
deeply grieve to have done him (without intending it) so much wrong.
I do not quite know how to write what I wish to say next, but I
trust you will understand it as I mean it. I have some fears, my dear-
est cousin, that it may be partly for my sake you are now laying up so
much unhappiness for yourself—and if for yourself, for me. In case
this should be so, or in case you should entertain much thought of
me in what you are doing, I most earnestly entreat and beg you to
desist. You can do nothing for my sake that will make me half so
happy as for ever turning your back upon the shadow in which we
both were born. Do not be angry with me for saying this. Pray, pray,
dear Richard, for my sake, and for your own, and in a natural repug-
nance for that source of trouble which had its share in making us
both orphans when we were very young, pray, pray, let it go for ever.
We have reason to know by this time that there is no good in it and
no hope, that there is nothing to be got from it but sorrow.
My dearest cousin, it is needless for me to say that you are quite
free and that it is very likely you may find some one whom you will
love much better than your first fancy. I am quite sure, if you will let
me say so, that the object of your choice would greatly prefer to
follow your fortunes far and wide, however moderate or poor, and
see you happy, doing your duty and pursuing your chosen way, than
to have the hope of being, or even to be, very rich with you (if such
a thing were possible) at the cost of dragging years of procrastination
and anxiety and of your indifference to other aims. You may wonder
at my saying this so confidently with so little knowledge or experi-
ence, but I know it for a certainty from my own heart.
Ever, my dearest cousin, your most affectionate
Ada
This note brought Richard to us very soon, but it made little change
in him if any. We would fairly try, he said, who was right and who
was wrong—he would show us—we should see! He was animated
and glowing, as if Ada’s tenderness had gratified him; but I could
only hope, with a sigh, that the letter might have some stronger
effect upon his mind on re-perusal than it assuredly had then.
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As they were to remain with us that day and had taken their places
to return by the coach next morning, I sought an opportunity of
speaking to Mr. Skimpole. Our out-of-door life easily threw one in
my way, and I delicately said that there was a responsibility in en-
couraging Richard.
“Responsibility, my dear Miss Summerson?” he repeated, catching
at the word with the pleasantest smile. “I am the last man in the world
for such a thing. I never was responsible in my life—I can’t be.”
“I am afraid everybody is obliged to be,” said I timidly enough, he
being so much older and more clever than I.
“No, really?” said Mr. Skimpole, receiving this new light with a
most agreeable jocularity of surprise. “But every man’s not obliged to
be solvent? I am not. I never was. See, my dear Miss Summerson,”
he took a handful of loose silver and halfpence from his pocket,
“there’s so much money. I have not an idea how much. I have not the
power of counting. Call it four and ninepence—call it four pound
nine. They tell me I owe more than that. I dare say I do. I dare say I
owe as much as good-natured people will let me owe. If they don’t
stop, why should I? There you have Harold Skimpole in little. If
that’s responsibility, I am responsible.”
The perfect ease of manner with which he put the money up again
and looked at me with a smile on his refined face, as if he had been
mentioning a curious little fact about somebody else, almost made
me feel as if he really had nothing to do with it.
“Now, when you mention responsibility,” he resumed, “I am dis-
posed to say that I never had the happiness of knowing any one whom I
should consider so refreshingly responsible as yourself. You appear to me
to be the very touchstone of responsibility. When I see you, my dear
Miss Summerson, intent upon the perfect working of the whole little
orderly system of which you are the centre, I feel inclined to say to my-
self—in fact I do say to myself very often—that’s responsibility!”
It was difficult, after this, to explain what I meant; but I persisted
so far as to say that we all hoped he would check and not confirm
Richard in the sanguine views he entertained just then.
“Most willingly,” he retorted, “if I could. But, my dear Miss
Summerson, I have no art, no disguise. If he takes me by the hand
and leads me through Westminster Hall in an airy procession after
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fortune, I must go. If he says, ‘Skimpole, join the dance!’ I must join
it. Common sense wouldn’t, I know, but I have no common sense.”
It was very unfortunate for Richard, I said.
“Do you think so!” returned Mr. Skimpole. “Don’t say that, don’t say
that. Let us suppose him keeping company with Common Sense—an
excellent man—a good deal wrinkled—dreadfully practical—change for
a ten-pound note in every pocket—ruled account-book in his hand—
say, upon the whole, resembling a tax-gatherer. Our dear Richard, san-
guine, ardent, overleaping obstacles, bursting with poetry like a young
bud, says to this highly respectable companion, ‘I see a golden prospect
before me; it’s very bright, it’s very beautiful, it’s very joyous; here I go,
bounding over the landscape to come at it!’ The respectable companion
instantly knocks him down with the ruled account-book; tells him in a
literal, prosaic way that he sees no such thing; shows him it’s nothing but
fees, fraud, horsehair wigs, and black gowns. Now you know that’s a
painful change—sensible in the last degree, I have no doubt, but dis-
agreeable. I can’t do it. I haven’t got the ruled account-book, I have none
of the tax-gatherlng elements in my composition, I am not at all respect-
able, and I don’t want to be. Odd perhaps, but so it is!”
It was idle to say more, so I proposed that we should join Ada and
Richard, who were a little in advance, and I gave up Mr. Skimpole in
despair. He had been over the Hall in the course of the morning and
whimsically described the family pictures as we walked. There were
such portentous shepherdesses among the Ladies Dedlock dead and
gone, he told us, that peaceful crooks became weapons of assault in
their hands. They tended their flocks severely in buckram and powder
and put their sticking-plaster patches on to terrify commoners as the
chiefs of some other tribes put on their war-paint. There was a Sir
Somebody Dedlock, with a battle, a sprung-mine, volumes of smoke,
flashes of lightning, a town on fire, and a stormed fort, all in full action
between his horse’s two hind legs, showing, he supposed, how little a
Dedlock made of such trifles. The whole race he represented as having
evidently been, in life, what he called “stuffed people”—a large collec-
tion, glassy eyed, set up in the most approved manner on their various
twigs and perches, very correct, perfectly free from animation, and
always in glass cases.
I was not so easy now during any reference to the name but that I felt
it a relief when Richard, with an exclamation of surprise, hurried away to
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trees, the gaunt pale horse with his ears pricked up, and the driving
away at speed to Jarndyce and Jarndyce.
My dear girl told me that night how Richard’s being thereafter
prosperous or ruined, befriended or deserted, could only make this
difference to her, that the more he needed love from one unchanging
heart, the more love that unchanging heart would have to give him;
how he thought of her through his present errors, and she would
think of him at all times—never of herself if she could devote herself
to him, never of her own delights if she could minister to his.
And she kept her word?
I look along the road before me, where the distance already short-
ens and the journey’s end is growing visible; and true and good above
the dead sea of the Chancery suit and all the ashy fruit it cast ashore,
I think I see my darling.
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CHAPTER XXXVIII
A Struggle
WHEN OUR TIME CAME for returning to Bleak House again, we were
punctual to the day and were received with an overpowering wel-
come. I was perfectly restored to health and strength, and finding my
housekeeping keys laid ready for me in my room, rang myself in as if
I had been a new year, with a merry little peal. “Once more, duty,
duty, Esther,” said I; “and if you are not overjoyed to do it, more
than cheerfully and contentedly, through anything and everything,
you ought to be. That’s all I have to say to you, my dear!”
The first few mornings were mornings of so much bustle and
business, devoted to such settlements of accounts, such repeated jour-
neys to and fro between the growlery and all other parts of the house,
so many rearrangements of drawers and presses, and such a general
new beginning altogether, that I had not a moment’s leisure. But
when these arrangements were completed and everything was in or-
der, I paid a visit of a few hours to London, which something in the
letter I had destroyed at Chesney Wold had induced me to decide
upon in my own mind.
I made Caddy Jellyby—her maiden name was so natural to me that
I always called her by it—the pretext for this visit and wrote her a note
previously asking the favour of her company on a little business expe-
dition. Leaving home very early in the morning, I got to London by
stage-coach in such good time that I got to Newman Street with the
day before me.
Caddy, who had not seen me since her wedding-day, was so glad
and so affectionate that I was half inclined to fear I should make her
husband jealous. But he was, in his way, just as bad—I mean as good;
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and in short it was the old story, and nobody would leave me any
possibility of doing anything meritorious.
The elder Mr. Turveydrop was in bed, I found, and Caddy was
milling his chocolate, which a melancholy little boy who was an
apprentice—it seemed such a curious thing to be apprenticed to the
trade of dancing—was waiting to carry upstairs. Her father-in-law
was extremely kind and considerate, Caddy told me, and they lived
most happily together. (When she spoke of their living together, she
meant that the old gentleman had all the good things and all the
good lodging, while she and her husband had what they could get,
and were poked into two corner rooms over the Mews.)
“And how is your mama, Caddy?” said I.
“Why, I hear of her, Esther,” replied Caddy, “through Pa, but I see
very little of her. We are good friends, I am glad to say, but Ma
thinks there is something absurd in my having married a dancing-
master, and she is rather afraid of its extending to her.”
It struck me that if Mrs. Jellyby had discharged her own natural
duties and obligations before she swept the horizon with a telescope in
search of others, she would have taken the best precautions against
becoming absurd, but I need scarcely observe that I kept this to myself.
“And your papa, Caddy?”
“He comes here every evening,” returned Caddy, “and is so fond of
sitting in the corner there that it’s a treat to see him.”
Looking at the corner, I plainly perceived the mark of Mr.
Jellyby’s head against the wall. It was consolatory to know that he
had found such a resting-place for it.
“And you, Caddy,” said I, “you are always busy, I’ll be bound?”
“Well, my dear,” returned Caddy, “I am indeed, for to tell you a
grand secret, I am qualifying myself to give lessons. Prince’s health is
not strong, and I want to be able to assist him. What with schools,
and classes here, and private pupils, and the apprentices, he really has
too much to do, poor fellow!”
The notion of the apprentices was still so odd to me that I asked
Caddy if there were many of them.
“Four,” said Caddy. “One in-door, and three out. They are very
good children; only when they get together they will play—chil-
dren-like—instead of attending to their work. So the little boy you
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saw just now waltzes by himself in the empty kitchen, and we dis-
tribute the others over the house as well as we can.”
“That is only for their steps, of course?” said I.
“Only for their steps,” said Caddy. “In that way they practise, so
many hours at a time, whatever steps they happen to be upon. They
dance in the academy, and at this time of year we do figures at five
every morning.”
“Why, what a laborious life!” I exclaimed.
“I assure you, my dear,” returned Caddy, smiling, “when the out-
door apprentices ring us up in the morning (the bell rings into our
room, not to disturb old Mr. Turveydrop), and when I put up the
window and see them standing on the door-step with their little
pumps under their arms, I am actually reminded of the Sweeps.”
All this presented the art to me in a singular light, to be sure.
Caddy enjoyed the effect of her communication and cheerfully re-
counted the particulars of her own studies.
“You see, my dear, to save expense I ought to know something of
the piano, and I ought to know something of the kit too, and conse-
quently I have to practise those two instruments as well as the details
of our profession. If Ma had been like anybody else, I might have
had some little musical knowledge to begin upon. However, I hadn’t
any; and that part of the work is, at first, a little discouraging, I must
allow. But I have a very good ear, and I am used to drudgery—I have
to thank Ma for that, at all events—and where there’s a will there’s a
way, you know, Esther, the world over.” Saying these words, Caddy
laughingly sat down at a little jingling square piano and really rattled
off a quadrille with great spirit. Then she good-humouredly and blush-
ingly got up again, and while she still laughed herself, said, “Don’t
laugh at me, please; that’s a dear girl!”
I would sooner have cried, but I did neither. I encouraged her and
praised her with all my heart. For I conscientiously believed, danc-
ing-master’s wife though she was, and dancing-mistress though in
her limited ambition she aspired to be, she had struck out a natural,
wholesome, loving course of industry and perseverance that was quite
as good as a mission.
“My dear,” said Caddy, delighted, “you can’t think how you cheer
me. I shall owe you, you don’t know how much. What changes, Esther,
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even in my small world! You recollect that first night, when I was so
unpolite and inky? Who would have thought, then, of my ever teach-
ing people to dance, of all other possibilities and impossibilities!”
Her husband, who had left us while we had this chat, now coming
back, preparatory to exercising the apprentices in the ball-room,
Caddy informed me she was quite at my disposal. But it was not my
time yet, I was glad to tell her, for I should have been vexed to take
her away then. Therefore we three adjourned to the apprentices to-
gether, and I made one in the dance.
The apprentices were the queerest little people. Besides the melan-
choly boy, who, I hoped, had not been made so by waltzing alone in
the empty kitchen, there were two other boys and one dirty little
limp girl in a gauzy dress. Such a precocious little girl, with such a
dowdy bonnet on (that, too, of a gauzy texture), who brought her
sandalled shoes in an old threadbare velvet reticule. Such mean little
boys, when they were not dancing, with string, and marbles, and
cramp-bones in their pockets, and the most untidy legs and feet—
and heels particularly.
I asked Caddy what had made their parents choose this profession
for them. Caddy said she didn’t know; perhaps they were designed for
teachers, perhaps for the stage. They were all people in humble circum-
stances, and the melancholy boy’s mother kept a ginger-beer shop.
We danced for an hour with great gravity, the melancholy child
doing wonders with his lower extremities, in which there appeared
to be some sense of enjoyment though it never rose above his waist.
Caddy, while she was observant of her husband and was evidently
founded upon him, had acquired a grace and self-possession of her
own, which, united to her pretty face and figure, was uncommonly
agreeable. She already relieved him of much of the instruction of
these young people, and he seldom interfered except to walk his part
in the figure if he had anything to do in it. He always played the
tune. The affectation of the gauzy child, and her condescension to
the boys, was a sight. And thus we danced an hour by the clock.
When the practice was concluded, Caddy’s husband made himself
ready to go out of town to a school, and Caddy ran away to get ready
to go out with me. I sat in the ball-room in the interval, contemplat-
ing the apprentices. The two out-door boys went upon the staircase
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to put on their half-boots and pull the in-door boy’s hair, as I judged
from the nature of his objections. Returning with their jackets but-
toned and their pumps stuck in them, they then produced packets of
cold bread and meat and bivouacked under a painted lyre on the
wall. The little gauzy child, having whisked her sandals into the reti-
cule and put on a trodden-down pair of shoes, shook her head into
the dowdy bonnet at one shake, and answering my inquiry whether
she liked dancing by replying, “Not with boys,” tied it across her
chin, and went home contemptuous.
“Old Mr. Turveydrop is so sorry,” said Caddy, “that he has not
finished dressing yet and cannot have the pleasure of seeing you be-
fore you go. You are such a favourite of his, Esther.”
I expressed myself much obliged to him, but did not think it nec-
essary to add that I readily dispensed with this attention.
“It takes him a long time to dress,” said Caddy, “because he is very
much looked up to in such things, you know, and has a reputation
to support. You can’t think how kind he is to Pa. He talks to Pa of an
evening about the Prince Regent, and I never saw Pa so interested.”
There was something in the picture of Mr. Turveydrop bestowing
his deportment on Mr. Jellyby that quite took my fancy. I asked
Caddy if he brought her papa out much.
“No,” said Caddy, “I don’t know that he does that, but he talks to
Pa, and Pa greatly admires him, and listens, and likes it. Of course I
am aware that Pa has hardly any claims to deportment, but they get
on together delightfully. You can’t think what good companions they
make. I never saw Pa take snuff before in my life, but he takes one
pinch out of Mr. Turveydrop’s box regularly and keeps putting it to
his nose and taking it away again all the evening.”
That old Mr. Turveydrop should ever, in the chances and changes of life,
have come to the rescue of Mr. Jellyby from Borrioboola-Gha appeared to
me to be one of the pleasantest of oddities.
“As to Peepy,” said Caddy with a little hesitation, “whom I was
most afraid of—next to having any family of my own, Esther—as
an inconvenience to Mr. Turveydrop, the kindness of the old gentle-
man to that child is beyond everything. He asks to see him, my dear!
He lets him take the newspaper up to him in bed; he gives him the
crusts of his toast to eat; he sends him on little errands about the
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accede to it.”
I must do Mr. Guppy the further justice of saying that he had
looked more and more ashamed and that he looked most ashamed
and very earnest when he now replied with a burning face, “Upon
my word and honour, upon my life, upon my soul, Miss Summerson,
as I am a living man, I’ll act according to your wish! I’ll never go
another step in opposition to it. I’ll take my oath to it if it will be
any satisfaction to you. In what I promise at this present time touch-
ing the matters now in question,” continued Mr. Guppy rapidly, as
if he were repeating a familiar form of words, “I speak the truth, the
whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so—”
“I am quite satisfied,” said I, rising at this point, “and I thank you
very much. Caddy, my dear, I am ready!”
Mr. Guppy’s mother returned with Caddy (now making me the
recipient of her silent laughter and her nudges), and we took our
leave. Mr. Guppy saw us to the door with the air of one who was
either imperfectly awake or walking in his sleep; and we left him
there, staring.
But in a minute he came after us down the street without any hat,
and with his long hair all blown about, and stopped us, saying fer-
vently, “Miss Summerson, upon my honour and soul, you may de-
pend upon me!”
“I do,” said I, “quite confidently.”
“I beg your pardon, miss,” said Mr. Guppy, going with one leg
and staying with the other, “but this lady being present—your own
witness—it might be a satisfaction to your mind (which I should
wish to set at rest) if you was to repeat those admissions.”
“Well, Caddy,” said I, turning to her, “perhaps you will not be
surprised when I tell you, my dear, that there never has been any
engagement—”
“No proposal or promise of marriage whatsoever,” suggested Mr.
Guppy.
“No proposal or promise of marriage whatsoever,” said I, “between
this gentleman—”
“William Guppy, of Penton Place, Pentonville, in the county of
Middlesex,” he murmured.
“Between this gentleman, Mr. William Guppy, of Penton Place,
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CHAPTER XXXIX
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tion to be always dirty and always shut unless coerced. This accounts
for the phenomenon of the weaker of the two usually having a bundle
of firewood thrust between its jaws in hot weather.
Mr. Vholes is a very respectable man. He has not a large business,
but he is a very respectable man. He is allowed by the greater attorneys
who have made good fortunes or are making them to be a most re-
spectable man. He never misses a chance in his practice, which is a
mark of respectability. He never takes any pleasure, which is another
mark of respectability. He is reserved and serious, which is another
mark of respectability. His digestion is impaired, which is highly re-
spectable. And he is making hay of the grass which is flesh, for his three
daughters. And his father is dependent on him in the Vale of Taunton.
The one great principle of the English law is to make business for
itself. There is no other principle distinctly, certainly, and consis-
tently maintained through all its narrow turnings. Viewed by this
light it becomes a coherent scheme and not the monstrous maze the
laity are apt to think it. Let them but once clearly perceive that its
grand principle is to make business for itself at their expense, and
surely they will cease to grumble.
But not perceiving this quite plainly—only seeing it by halves in a
confused way—the laity sometimes suffer in peace and pocket, with
a bad grace, and do grumble very much. Then this respectability of
Mr. Vholes is brought into powerful play against them. “Repeal this
statute, my good sir?” says Mr. Kenge to a smarting client. “Repeal it,
my dear sir? Never, with my consent. Alter this law, sir, and what
will be the effect of your rash proceeding on a class of practitioners
very worthily represented, allow me to say to you, by the opposite
attorney in the case, Mr. Vholes? Sir, that class of practitioners would
be swept from the face of the earth. Now you cannot afford—I will
say, the social system cannot afford—to lose an order of men like
Mr. Vholes. Diligent, persevering, steady, acute in business. My dear
sir, I understand your present feelings against the existing state of
things, which I grant to be a little hard in your case; but I can never
raise my voice for the demolition of a class of men like Mr. Vholes.”
The respectability of Mr. Vholes has even been cited with crushing
effect before Parliamentary committees, as in the following blue
minutes of a distinguished attorney’s evidence. “Question (number
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ought to be, takes off his close black gloves as if he were skinning his
hands, lifts off his tight hat as if he were scalping himself, and sits
down at his desk. The client throws his hat and gloves upon the
ground—tosses them anywhere, without looking after them or car-
ing where they go; flings himself into a chair, half sighing and half
groaning; rests his aching head upon his hand and looks the portrait
of young despair.
“Again nothing done!” says Richard. “Nothing, nothing done!”
“Don’t say nothing done, sir,” returns the placid Vholes. “That is
scarcely fair, sir, scarcely fair!”
“Why, what IS done?” says Richard, turning gloomily upon him.
“That may not be the whole question,” returns Vholes, “The ques-
tion may branch off into what is doing, what is doing?”
“And what is doing?” asks the moody client.
Vholes, sitting with his arms on the desk, quietly bringing the tips
of his five right fingers to meet the tips of his five left fingers, and
quietly separating them again, and fixedly and slowly looking at his
client, replies, “A good deal is doing, sir. We have put our shoulders
to the wheel, Mr. Carstone, and the wheel is going round.”
“Yes, with Ixion on it. How am I to get through the next four or
five accursed months?” exclaims the young man, rising from his chair
and walking about the room.
“Mr. C.,” returns Vholes, following him close with his eyes wher-
ever he goes, “your spirits are hasty, and I am sorry for it on your
account. Excuse me if I recommend you not to chafe so much, not
to be so impetuous, not to wear yourself out so. You should have
more patience. You should sustain yourself better.”
“I ought to imitate you, in fact, Mr. Vholes?” says Richard, sitting
down again with an impatient laugh and beating the devil’s tattoo
with his boot on the patternless carpet.
“Sir,” returns Vholes, always looking at the client as if he were
making a lingering meal of him with his eyes as well as with his
professional appetite. “Sir,” returns Vholes with his inward manner
of speech and his bloodless quietude, “I should not have had the
presumption to propose myself as a model for your imitation or any
man’s. Let me but leave the good name to my three daughters, and
that is enough for me; I am not a self-seeker. But since you mention
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hands, sir, and I accepted them with clean hands. Those interests are
now paramount in this office. My digestive functions, as you may
have heard me mention, are not in a good state, and rest might im-
prove them; but I shall not rest, sir, while I am your representative.
Whenever you want me, you will find me here. Summon me any-
where, and I will come. During the long vacation, sir, I shall devote
my leisure to studying your interests more and more closely and to
making arrangements for moving heaven and earth (including, of
course, the Chancellor) after Michaelmas term; and when I ultimately
congratulate you, sir,” says Mr. Vholes with the severity of a deter-
mined man, “when I ultimately congratulate you, sir, with all my
heart, on your accession to fortune—which, but that I never give
hopes, I might say something further about—you will owe me nothing
beyond whatever little balance may be then outstanding of the costs
as between solicitor and client not included in the taxed costs al-
lowed out of the estate. I pretend to no claim upon you, Mr. C., but
for the zealous and active discharge—not the languid and routine
discharge, sir: that much credit I stipulate for—of my professional
duty. My duty prosperously ended, all between us is ended.”
Vholes finally adds, by way of rider to this declaration of his prin-
ciples, that as Mr. Carstone is about to rejoin his regiment, perhaps
Mr. C. will favour him with an order on his agent for twenty pounds
on account.
“For there have been many little consultations and attendances of
late, sir,” observes Vholes, turning over the leaves of his diary, “and
these things mount up, and I don’t profess to be a man of capital.
When we first entered on our present relations I stated to you openly—
it is a principle of mine that there never can be too much openness
between solicitor and client—that I was not a man of capital and
that if capital was your object you had better leave your papers in
Kenge’s office. No, Mr. C., you will find none of the advantages or
disadvantages of capital here, sir. This,” Vholes gives the desk one
hollow blow again, “is your rock; it pretends to be nothing more.”
The client, with his dejection insensibly relieved and his vague
hopes rekindled, takes pen and ink and writes the draft, not without
perplexed consideration and calculation of the date it may bear, im-
plying scant effects in the agent’s hands. All the while, Vholes, but-
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toned up in body and mind, looks at him attentively. All the while,
Vholes’s official cat watches the mouse’s hole.
Lastly, the client, shaking hands, beseeches Mr. Vholes, for heaven’s
sake and earth’s sake, to do his utmost to “pull him through” the
Court of Chancery. Mr. Vholes, who never gives hopes, lays his palm
upon the client’s shoulder and answers with a smile, “Always here,
sir. Personally, or by letter, you will always find me here, sir, with my
shoulder to the wheel.” Thus they part, and Vholes, left alone, em-
ploys himself in carrying sundry little matters out of his diary into
his draft bill book for the ultimate behoof of his three daughters. So
might an industrious fox or bear make up his account of chickens or
stray travellers with an eye to his cubs, not to disparage by that word
the three raw-visaged, lank, and buttoned-up maidens who dwell
with the parent Vholes in an earthy cottage situated in a damp gar-
den at Kennington.
Richard, emerging from the heavy shade of Symond’s Inn into the
sunshine of Chancery Lane—for there happens to be sunshine there
to-day—walks thoughtfully on, and turns into Lincoln’s Inn, and passes
under the shadow of the Lincoln’s Inn trees. On many such loungers
have the speckled shadows of those trees often fallen; on the like bent
head, the bitten nail, the lowering eye, the lingering step, the purpose-
less and dreamy air, the good consuming and consumed, the life turned
sour. This lounger is not shabby yet, but that may come. Chancery,
which knows no wisdom but in precedent, is very rich in such prece-
dents; and why should one be different from ten thousand?
Yet the time is so short since his depreciation began that as he saun-
ters away, reluctant to leave the spot for some long months together,
though he hates it, Richard himself may feel his own case as if it were
a startling one. While his heart is heavy with corroding care, suspense,
distrust, and doubt, it may have room for some sorrowful wonder
when he recalls how different his first visit there, how different he,
how different all the colours of his mind. But injustice breeds injus-
tice; the fighting with shadows and being defeated by them necessi-
tates the setting up of substances to combat; from the impalpable suit
which no man alive can understand, the time for that being long gone
by, it has become a gloomy relief to turn to the palpable figure of the
friend who would have saved him from this ruin and make him his
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with you, I don’t greatly relish the house, except in your company,
and therefore I have not; and therefore I proposed this little appoint-
ment for our fetching away your things. There goes the hour by the
clock! Tony”—Mr. Guppy becomes mysteriously and tenderly elo-
quent—”it is necessary that I should impress upon your mind once
more that circumstances over which I have no control have made a
melancholy alteration in my most cherished plans and in that unre-
quited image which I formerly mentioned to you as a friend. That
image is shattered, and that idol is laid low. My only wish now in
connexion with the objects which I had an idea of carrying out in the
court with your aid as a friend is to let ‘em alone and bury ‘em in
oblivion. Do you think it possible, do you think it at all likely (I put
it to you, Tony, as a friend), from your knowledge of that capricious
and deep old character who fell a prey to the—spontaneous element,
do you, Tony, think it at all likely that on second thoughts he put
those letters away anywhere, after you saw him alive, and that they
were not destroyed that night?”
Mr. Weevle reflects for some time. Shakes his head. Decidedly
thinks not.
“Tony,” says Mr. Guppy as they walk towards the court, “once again
understand me, as a friend. Without entering into further explana-
tions, I may repeat that the idol is down. I have no purpose to serve
now but burial in oblivion. To that I have pledged myself. I owe it to
myself, and I owe it to the shattered image, as also to the circumstances
over which I have no control. If you was to express to me by a gesture,
by a wink, that you saw lying anywhere in your late lodgings any pa-
pers that so much as looked like the papers in question, I would pitch
them into the fire, sir, on my own responsibility.”
Mr. Weevle nods. Mr. Guppy, much elevated in his own opinion
by having delivered these observations, with an air in part forensic
and in part romantic—this gentleman having a passion for conduct-
ing anything in the form of an examination, or delivering anything
in the form of a summing up or a speech—accompanies his friend
with dignity to the court.
Never since it has been a court has it had such a Fortunatus’ purse
of gossip as in the proceedings at the rag and bottle shop. Regularly,
every morning at eight, is the elder Mr. Smallweed brought down to
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come in, but has done it handsomely, bringing in with him all his
nephews, all his male cousins, and all his brothers-in-law. So there is
hope for the old ship yet.
Doodle has found that he must throw himself upon the country,
chiefly in the form of sovereigns and beer. In this metamorphosed
state he is available in a good many places simultaneously and can
throw himself upon a considerable portion of the country at one
time. Britannia being much occupied in pocketing Doodle in the
form of sovereigns, and swallowing Doodle in the form of beer, and
in swearing herself black in the face that she does neither—plainly to
the advancement of her glory and morality—the London season
comes to a sudden end, through all the Doodleites and Coodleites
dispersing to assist Britannia in those religious exercises.
Hence Mrs. Rouncewell, housekeeper at Chesney Wold, foresees,
though no instructions have yet come down, that the family may
shortly be expected, together with a pretty large accession of cousins
and others who can in any way assist the great Constitutional work.
And hence the stately old dame, taking Time by the forelock, leads
him up and down the staircases, and along the galleries and passages,
and through the rooms, to witness before he grows any older that
everything is ready, that floors are rubbed bright, carpets spread, cur-
tains shaken out, beds puffed and patted, still-room and kitchen cleared
for action—all things prepared as beseems the Dedlock dignity.
This present summer evening, as the sun goes down, the prepara-
tions are complete. Dreary and solemn the old house looks, with so
many appliances of habitation and with no inhabitants except the
pictured forms upon the walls. So did these come and go, a Dedlock
in possession might have ruminated passing along; so did they see
this gallery hushed and quiet, as I see it now; so think, as I think, of
the gap that they would make in this domain when they were gone;
so find it, as I find it, difficult to believe that it could be without
them; so pass from my world, as I pass from theirs, now closing the
reverberating door; so leave no blank to miss them, and so die.
Through some of the fiery windows beautiful from without, and
set, at this sunset hour, not in dull-grey stone but in a glorious house
of gold, the light excluded at other windows pours in rich, lavish,
overflowing like the summer plenty in the land. Then do the frozen
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“No, Volumnia. This distracted country has lost its senses in many
respects, I grieve to say, but—”
“It is not so mad as that. I am glad to hear it!”
Volumnia’s finishing the sentence restores her to favour. Sir Leices-
ter, with a gracious inclination of his head, seems to say to himself, “A
sensible woman this, on the whole, though occasionally precipitate.”
In fact, as to this question of opposition, the fair Dedlock’s
observation was superfluous, Sir Leicester on these occasions
always delivering in his own candidateship, as a kind of handsome
wholesale order to be promptly executed. Two other little seats that
belong to him he treats as retail orders of less importance, merely
sending down the men and signifying to the tradespeople, “You will
have the goodness to make these materials into two members of
Parliament and to send them home when done.”
“I regret to say, Volumnia, that in many places the people have
shown a bad spirit, and that this opposition to the government has
been of a most determined and most implacable description.”
“W-r-retches!” says Volumnia.
“Even,” proceeds Sir Leicester, glancing at the circumjacent
cousins on sofas and ottomans, “even in many—in fact, in most—of
those places in which the government has carried it against a fac-
tion—”
(Note, by the way, that the Coodleites are always a faction with
the Doodleites, and that the Doodleites occupy exactly the same
position towards the Coodleites.)
“—Even in them I am shocked, for the credit of Englishmen, to
be constrained to inform you that the party has not triumphed with-
out being put to an enormous expense. Hundreds,” says Sir Leices-
ter, eyeing the cousins with increasing dignity and swelling indigna-
tion, “hundreds of thousands of pounds!”
If Volumnia have a fault, it is the fault of being a trifle too inno-
cent, seeing that the innocence which would go extremely well with
a sash and tucker is a little out of keeping with the rouge and pearl
necklace. Howbeit, impelled by innocence, she asks, “What for?”
“Volumnia,” remonstrates Sir Leicester with his utmost severity.
“Volumnia!”
“No, no, I don’t mean what for,” cries Volumnia with her favourite
little scream. “How stupid I am! I mean what a pity!”
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fectly still.
“The captain in the army being dead, she believed herself safe; but
a train of circumstances with which I need not trouble you led to
discovery. As I received the story, they began in an imprudence on
her own part one day when she was taken by surprise, which shows
how difficult it is for the firmest of us (she was very firm) to be
always guarded. There was great domestic trouble and amazement,
you may suppose; I leave you to imagine, Sir Leicester, the husband’s
grief. But that is not the present point. When Mr. Rouncewell’s towns-
man heard of the disclosure, he no more allowed the girl to be pa-
tronized and honoured than he would have suffered her to be trod-
den underfoot before his eyes. Such was his pride, that he indig-
nantly took her away, as if from reproach and disgrace. He had no
sense of the honour done him and his daughter by the lady’s conde-
scension; not the least. He resented the girl’s position, as if the lady
had been the commonest of commoners. That is the story. I hope
Lady Dedlock will excuse its painful nature.”
There are various opinions on the merits, more or less conflicting
with Volumnia’s. That fair young creature cannot believe there ever
was any such lady and rejects the whole history on the threshold. The
majority incline to the debilitated cousin’s sentiment, which is in few
words—”no business—Rouncewell’s fernal townsman.” Sir Leices-
ter generally refers back in his mind to Wat Tyler and arranges a se-
quence of events on a plan of his own.
There is not much conversation in all, for late hours have been kept
at Chesney Wold since the necessary expenses elsewhere began, and this
is the first night in many on which the family have been alone. It is past
ten when Sir Leicester begs Mr. Tulkinghorn to ring for candles. Then
the stream of moonlight has swelled into a lake, and then Lady Dedlock
for the first time moves, and rises, and comes forward to a table for a
glass of water. Winking cousins, bat-like in the candle glare, crowd
round to give it; Volumnia (always ready for something better if pro-
curable) takes another, a very mild sip of which contents her; Lady
Dedlock, graceful, self-possessed, looked after by admiring eyes, passes
away slowly down the long perspective by the side of that nymph, not
at all improving her as a question of contrast.
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And she would do it, thinks the lawver, watchful of the firm hand
with which she takes the pen!
“I will not trouble you, Lady Dedlock. Pray spare yourself.”
“I have long expected this, as you know. I neither wish to spare
myself nor to be spared. You can do nothing worse to me than you
have done. Do what remains now.”
“Lady Dedlock, there is nothing to be done. I will take leave to say
a few words when you have finished.”
Their need for watching one another should be over now, but
they do it all this time, and the stars watch them both through the
opened window. Away in the moonlight lie the woodland fields at
rest, and the wide house is as quiet as the narrow one. The narrow
one! Where are the digger and the spade, this peaceful night, destined
to add the last great secret to the many secrets of the Tulkinghorn
existence? Is the man born yet, is the spade wrought yet? Curious
questions to consider, more curious perhaps not to consider, under
the watching stars upon a summer night.
“Of repentance or remorse or any feeling of mine,” Lady Dedlock
presently proceeds, “I say not a word. If I were not dumb, you would
be deaf. Let that go by. It is not for your ears.”
He makes a feint of offering a protest, but she sweeps it away with
her disdainful hand.
“Of other and very different things I come to speak to you. My
jewels are all in their proper places of keeping. They will be found
there. So, my dresses. So, all the valuables I have. Some ready money I
had with me, please to say, but no large amount. I did not wear my
own dress, in order that I might avoid observation. I went to be hence-
forward lost. Make this known. I leave no other charge with you.”
“Excuse me, Lady Dedlock,” says Mr. Tulkinghorn, quite unmoved.
“I am not sure that I understand you. You want—”
“To be lost to all here. I leave Chesney Wold to-night. I go this
hour.”
Mr. Tulkinghorn shakes his head. She rises, but he, without mov-
ing hand from chair-back or from old-fashioned waistcoat and shirt-
frill, shakes his head.
“What? Not go as I have said?”
“No, Lady Dedlock,” he very calmly replies.
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“Do you know the relief that my disappearance will be? Have
you forgotten the stain and blot upon this place, and where it is,
and who it is?”
“No, Lady Dedlock, not by any means.”
Without deigning to rejoin, she moves to the inner door and has it
in her hand when he says to her, without himself stirring hand or
foot or raising his voice, “Lady Dedlock, have the goodness to stop
and hear me, or before you reach the staircase I shall ring the alarm-
bell and rouse the house. And then I must speak out before every
guest and servant, every man and woman, in it.”
He has conquered her. She falters, trembles, and puts her hand
confusedly to her head. Slight tokens these in any one else, but when
so practised an eye as Mr. Tulkinghorn’s sees indecision for a mo-
ment in such a subject, he thoroughly knows its value.
He promptly says again, “Have the goodness to hear me, Lady
Dedlock,” and motions to the chair from which she has risen. She
hesitates, but he motions again, and she sits down.
“The relations between us are of an unfortunate description, Lady
Dedlock; but as they are not of my making, I will not apologize for
them. The position I hold in reference to Sir Leicester is so well
known to you that I can hardly imagine but that I must long have
appeared in your eyes the natural person to make this discovery.”
“Sir,” she returns without looking up from the ground on which
her eyes are now fixed, “I had better have gone. It would have been
far better not to have detained me. I have no more to say.”
“Excuse me, Lady Dedlock, if I add a little more to hear.”
“I wish to hear it at the window, then. I can’t breathe where I am.”
His jealous glance as she walks that way betrays an instant’s
misgiving that she may have it in her thoughts to leap over, and
dashing against ledge and cornice, strike her life out upon the terrace
below. But a moment’s observation of her figure as she stands in the
window without any support, looking out at the stars—not up-
gloomily out at those stars which are low in the heavens, reassures
him. By facing round as she has moved, he stands a little behind her.
“Lady Dedlock, I have not yet been able to come to a decision
satisfactory to myself on the course before me. I am not clear what to
do or how to act next. I must request you, in the meantime, to keep
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your secret as you have kept it so long and not to wonder that I keep
it too.”
He pauses, but she makes no reply.
“Pardon me, Lady Dedlock. This is an important subject. You are
honouring me with your attention?”
“I am.”
“‘Thank you. I might have known it from what I have seen of
your strength of character. I ought not to have asked the question,
but I have the habit of making sure of my ground, step by step, as I
go on. The sole consideration in this unhappy case is Sir Leicester.”
“‘Then why,” she asks in a low voice and without removing her
gloomy look from those distant stars, “do you detain me in his house?”
“Because he is the consideration. Lady Dedlock, I have no occa-
sion to tell you that Sir Leicester is a very proud man, that his reli-
ance upon you is implicit, that the fall of that moon out of the sky
would not amaze him more than your fall from your high position
as his wife.”
She breathes quickly and heavily, but she stands as unflinchingly as
ever he has seen her in the midst of her grandest company.
“I declare to you, Lady Dedlock, that with anything short of this
case that I have, I would as soon have hoped to root up by means of
my own strength and my own hands the oldest tree on this estate as
to shake your hold upon Sir Leicester and Sir Leicester’s trust and
confidence in you. And even now, with this case, I hesitate. Not that
he could doubt (that, even with him, is impossible), but that noth-
ing can prepare him for the blow.”
“Not my flight?” she returned. “Think of it again.”
“Your flight, Lady Dedlock, would spread the whole truth, and a
hundred times the whole truth, far and wide. It would be impossible
to save the family credit for a day. It is not to be thought of.”
There is a quiet decision in his reply which admits of no
remonstrance.
“When I speak of Sir Leicester being the sole consideration, he and
the family credit are one. Sir Leicester and the baronetcy, Sir Leices-
ter and Chesney Wold, Sir Leicester and his ancestors and his patri-
mony”—Mr. Tulkinghorn very dry here—”are, I need not say to
you, Lady Dedlock, inseparable.”
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“Go on!”
“Therefore,” says Mr. Tulkinghorn, pursuing his case in his jog-
trot style, “I have much to consider. This is to be hushed up if it can
be. How can it be, if Sir Leicester is driven out of his wits or laid
upon a death-bed? If I inflicted this shock upon him to-morrow
morning, how could the immediate change in him be accounted for?
What could have caused it? What could have divided you? Lady
Dedlock, the wall-chalking and the street-crying would come on di-
rectly, and you are to remember that it would not affect you merely
(whom I cannot at all consider in this business) but
your husband, Lady Dedlock, your husband.”
He gets plainer as he gets on, but not an atom more emphatic or
animated.
“There is another point of view,” he continues, “in which the case
presents itself. Sir Leicester is devoted to you almost to infatuation.
He might not be able to overcome that infatuation, even knowing
what we know. I am putting an extreme case, but it might be so. If
so, it were better that he knew nothing. Better for common sense,
better for him, better for me. I must take all this into account, and it
combines to render a decision very difficult.”
She stands looking out at the same stars without a word. They are
beginning to pale, and she looks as if their coldness froze her.
“My experience teaches me,” says Mr. Tulkinghorn, who has by
this time got his hands in his pockets and is going on in his business
consideration of the matter like a machine. “My experience teaches
me, Lady Dedlock, that most of the people I know would do far
better to leave marriage alone. It is at the bottom of three fourths of
their troubles. So I thought when Sir Leicester married, and so I
always have thought since. No more about that. I must now be guided
by circumstances. In the meanwhile I must beg you to keep your
own counsel, and I will keep mine.”
“I am to drag my present life on, holding its pains at your
pleasure, day by day?” she asks, still looking at the distant sky.
“Yes, I am afraid so, Lady Dedlock.”
“It is necessary, you think, that I should be so tied to the stake?”
“I am sure that what I recommend is necessary.”
“I am to remain on this gaudy platforna on which my miserable
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upon herself.
He would know it all the better if he saw the woman pacing her
own rooms with her hair wildly thrown from her flung-back face, her
hands clasped behind her head, her figure twisted as if by pain. He
would think so all the more if he saw the woman thus hurrying up and
down for hours, without fatigue, without intermission, followed by
the faithful step upon the Ghost’s Walk. But he shuts out the now
chilled air, draws the window-curtain, goes to bed, and falls asleep.
And truly when the stars go out and the wan day peeps into the turret-
chamber, finding him at his oldest, he looks as if the digger and the
spade were both commissioned and would soon be digging.
The same wan day peeps in at Sir Leicester pardoning the repen-
tant country in a majestically condescending dream; and at the cous-
ins entering on various public employments, principally receipt of
salary; and at the chaste Volumnia, bestowing a dower of fifty thou-
sand pounds upon a hideous old general with a mouth of false teeth
like a pianoforte too full of keys, long the admiration of Bath and
the terror of every other commuuity. Also into rooms high in the
roof, and into offices in court-yards, and over stables, where hum-
bler ambition dreams of bliss, in keepers’ lodges, and in holy matri-
mony with Will or Sally. Up comes the bright sun, drawing every-
thing up with it—the Wills and Sallys, the latent vapour in the earth,
the drooping leaves and flowers, the birds and beasts and creeping
things, the gardeners to sweep the dewy turf and unfold emerald
velvet where the roller passes, the smoke of the great kitchen fire
wreathing itself straight and high into the lightsome air. Lastly, up
comes the flag over Mr. Tulkinghorn’s unconscious head cheerfully
proclaiming that Sir Leicester and Lady Dedlock are in their happy
home and that there is hospitality at the place in Lincolnshire.
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CHAPTER XLII
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“Just so, sir,” returns Mr. Snagsby; “I was sure you would feel it
yourself and would excuse the reasonableness of MY feelings when
coupled with the known excitableness of my little woman. You see,
the foreign female—which you mentioned her name just now, with
quite a native sound I am sure—caught up the word Snagsby that
night, being uncommon quick, and made inquiry, and got the direc-
tion and come at dinner-time. Now Guster, our young woman, is
timid and has fits, and she, taking fright at the foreigner’s
looks—which are fierce—and at a grinding manner that she has of
speaking—which is calculated to alarm a weak mind—gave way to
it, instead of bearing up against it, and tumbled down the kitchen
stairs out of one into another, such fits as I do sometimes think are
never gone into, or come out of, in any house but ours. Conse-
quently there was by good fortune ample occupation for my little
woman, and only me to answer the shop. When she did say that Mr.
Tulkinghorn, being always denied to her by his employer (which I
had no doubt at the time was a foreign mode of viewing a clerk), she
would do herself the pleasure of continually calling at my place until
she was let in here. Since then she has been, as I began by saying,
hovering, hovering, sir”—Mr. Snagsby repeats the word with pa-
thetic emphasis—”in the court. The effects of which movement it is
impossible to calculate. I shouldn’t wonder if it might have already
given rise to the painfullest mistakes even in the neighbours’ minds,
not mentioning (if such a thing was possible) my little woman.
Whereas, goodness knows,” says Mr. Snagsby, shaking his head, “I
never had an idea of a foreign female, except as being formerly con-
nected with a bunch of brooms and a baby, or at the present time
with a tambourine and earrings.
I never had, I do assure you, sir!”
Mr. Tulkinghorn had listened gravely to this complaint and in-
quires when the stationer has finished, “And that’s all, is it, Snagsby?”
“Why yes, sir, that’s all,” says Mr. Snagsby, ending with a cough
that plainly adds, “and it’s enough too—for me.”
“I don’t know what Mademoiselle Hortense may want or mean,
unless she is mad,” says the lawyer.
“Even if she was, you know, sir,” Mr. Snagsby pleads, “it wouldn’t
be a consolation to have some weapon or another in the form of a
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“Now, mistress,” says the lawyer, tapping the key hastily upon the
chimney-piece. “If you have anything to say, say it, say it.”
“Sir, you have not use me well. You have been mean and shabby.”
“Mean and shabby, eh?” returns the lawyer, rubbing his nose with
the key.
“Yes. What is it that I tell you? You know you have. You have attrapped
me—catched me—to give you information; you have asked me to show
you the dress of mine my Lady must have wore that night, you have
prayed me to come in it here to meet that boy. Say! Is it not?” Mademoi-
selle Hortense makes another spring.
“You are a vixen, a vixen!” Mr. Tulkinghorn seems to meditate as
he looks distrustfully at her, then he replies, “Well, wench, well. I
paid you.”
“You paid me!” she repeats with fierce disdain. “Two sovereign! I
have not change them, I re-fuse them, I des-pise them, I throw them
from me!” Which she literally does, taking them out of her bosom as
she speaks and flinging them with such violence on the floor that
they jerk up again into the light before they roll away into corners
and slowly settle down there after spinning vehemently.
“Now!” says Mademoiselle Hortense, darkening her large eyes again.
“You have paid me? Eh, my God, oh yes!”
Mr. Tulkinghorn rubs his head with the key while she entertains
herself with a sarcastic laugh.
“You must be rich, my fair friend,” he composedly observes, “to
throw money about in that way!”
“I am rich,” she returns. “I am very rich in hate. I hate my
Lady, of all my heart. You know that.”
“Know it? How should I know it?”
“Because you have known it perfectly before you prayed me to
give you that information. Because you have known perfectly that I
was en-r-r-r-raged!” It appears impossible for mademoiselle to roll
the letter “r” sufficiently in this word, notwithstanding that she as-
sists her energetic delivery by clenching both her hands and setting all
her teeth.
“Oh! I knew that, did I?” says Mr. Tulkinghorn, examining the
wards of the key.
“Yes, without doubt. I am not blind. You have made sure of me
because you knew that. You had reason! I det-est her.”
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Mademoiselle folds her arms and throws this last remark at him over
one of her shoulders.
“Having said this, have you anything else to say, mademoiselle?”
“I am not yet placed. Place me well. Find me a good condition! If
you cannot, or do not choose to do that, employ me to pursue her,
to chase her, to disgrace and to dishonour her. I will help you well,
and with a good will. It is what you do. Do I not know that?”
“You appear to know a good deal,” Mr. Tulkinghorn retorts.
“Do I not? Is it that I am so weak as to believe, like a child,
that I come here in that dress to rec-cive that boy only to decide a
little bet, a wager? Eh, my God, oh yes!” In this reply, down to the
word “wager” inclusive, mademoiselle has been ironically polite and
tender, then as suddenly dashed into the bitterest and most defiant
scorn, with her black eyes in one and the same moment very nearly
shut and staringly wide open.
“Now, let us see,” says Mr. Tulkinghorn, tapping his chin with the
key and looking imperturbably at her, “how this matter stands.”
“Ah! Let us see,” mademoiselle assents, with many angry and tight
nods of her head.
“You come here to make a remarkably modest demand, which
you have just stated, and it not being conceded, you will come again.”
“And again,” says mademoiselle with more tight and angry nods. “And
yet again. And yet again. And many times again. In effect, for ever!”
“And not only here, but you will go to Mr, Snagsby’s too, perhaps? That
visit not succeeding either, you will go again perhaps?”
“And again,” repeats mademoiselle, cataleptic with determination.
“And yet again. And yet again. And many times again. In effect, for
ever!”
“Very well. Now, Mademoiselle Hortense, let me recommend you
to take the candle and pick up that money of yours. I think you will
find it behind the clerk’s partition in the corner yonder.”
She merely throws a laugh over her shoulder and stands her ground
with folded arms.
“You will not, eh?”
“No, I will not!”
“So much the poorer you; so much the richer I! Look, mistress, this
is the key of my wine-cellar. It is a large key, but the keys of prisons are
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larger. In this city there are houses of correction (where the treadmills
are, for women), the gates of which are very strong and heavy, and no
doubt the keys too. I am afraid a lady of your spirit and activity would
find it an inconvenience to have one of those keys turned upon her for
any length of time. What do you think?”
“I think,” mademoiselle replies without any action and in a clear,
obliging voice, “that you are a miserable wretch.”
“Probably,” returns Mr. Tulkinghorn, quietly blowing his nose.
“But I don’t ask what you think of myself; I ask what you think of
the prison.”
“Nothing. What does it matter to me?”
“Why, it matters this much, mistress,” says the lawyer, deliberately
putting away his handkerchief and adjusting his frill; “the law is so
despotic here that it interferes to prevent any of our good English
citizens from being troubled, even by a lady’s visits against his desire.
And on his complaining that he is so troubled, it takes hold of the
troublesome lady and shuts her up in prison under hard discipline.
Turns the key upon her, mistress.” Illustrating with the cellar-key.
“Truly?” returns mademoiselle in the same pleasant voice. “That is
droll! But—my faith! —still what does it matter to me?”
“My fair friend,” says Mr. Tulkinghorn, “make another visit here,
or at Mr. Snagsby’s, and you shall learn.”
“In that case you will send me to the prison, perhaps?”
“Perhaps.”
It would be contradictory for one in mademoiselle’s state of agree-
able jocularity to foam at the mouth, otherwise a tigerish expansion
thereabouts might look as if a very little more would make her do it.
“In a word, mistress,” says Mr. Tulkinghorn, “I am sorry to be
unpolite, but if you ever present yourself uninvited here—or there—
again, I will give you over to the police. Their gallantry is great, but
they carry troublesome people through the streets in an ignominious
manner, strapped down on a board, my good wench.”
“I will prove you,” whispers mademoiselle, stretching out her hand,
“I will try if you dare to do it!”
“And if,” pursues the lawyer without minding her, “I place you in
that good condition of being locked up in jail, it will be some time
before you find yourself at liberty again.”
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CHAPTER XLIII
Esther’s Narrative
IT MATTERS LITTLE NOW how much I thought of my living mother who
had told me evermore to consider her dead. I could not venture to ap-
proach her or to communicate with her in writing, for my sense of the
peril in which her life was passed was only to be equalled by my fears of
increasing it. Knowing that my mere existence as a living creature was an
unforeseen danger in her way, I could not always conquer that terror of
myself which had seized me when I first knew the secret. At no time did
I dare to utter her name. I felt as if I did not even dare to hear it. If the
conversation anywhere, when I was present, took that direction, as it
sometimes naturally did, I tried not to hear: I mentally counted, re-
peated something that I knew, or went out of the room. I am conscious
now that I often did these things when there can have been no danger of
her being spoken of, but I did them in the dread I had of hearing any-
thing that might lead to her betrayal, and to her betrayal through me.
It matters little now how often I recalled the tones of my mother’s
voice, wondered whether I should ever hear it again as I so longed to
do, and thought how strange and desolate it was that it should be so
new to me. It matters little that I watched for every public mention of
my mother’s name; that I passed and repassed the door of her house in
town, loving it, but afraid to look at it; that I once sat in the theatre
when my mother was there and saw me, and when we were so wide
asunder before the great company of all degrees that any link or confi-
dence between us seemed a dream. It is all, all over. My lot has been so
blest that I can relate little of myself which is not a story of goodness
and generosity in others. I may well pass that little and go on.
When we were settled at home again, Ada and I had many
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“My dear good friend,” returned Mr. Skimpole, “and my dear Miss
Siunmerson, and my dear Miss Clare, how can I do that? It’s busi-
ness, and I don’t know business. It is he who encourages me. He
emerges from great feats of business, presents the brightest prospects
before me as their result, and calls upon me to admire them. I do
admire them—as bright prospects. But I know no more about them,
and I tell him so.”
The helpless kind of candour with which he presented this before
us, the light-hearted manner in which he was amused by his inno-
cence, the fantastic way in which he took himself under his own
protection and argued about that curious person, combined with the
delightful ease of everything he said exactly to make out my guardian’s
case. The more I saw of him, the more unlikely it seemed to me,
when he was present, that he could design, conceal, or influence any-
thing; and yet the less likely that appeared when he was not present,
and the less agreeable it was to think of his having anything to do
with any one for whom I cared.
Hearing that his examination (as he called it) was now over, Mr.
Skimpole left the room with a radiant face to fetch his daughters (his
sons had run away at various times), leaving my guardian quite de-
lighted by the manner in which he had vindicated his childish charac-
ter. He soon came back, bringing with him the three young ladies and
Mrs. Skimpole, who had once been a beauty but was now a delicate
high-nosed invalid suffering under a complication of disorders.
“This,” said Mr. Skimpole, “is my Beauty daughter, Arethusa—
plays and sings odds and ends like her father. This is my Sentiment
daughter, Laura—plays a little but don’t sing. This is my Comedy
daughter, Kitty—sings a little but don’t play. We all draw a little and
compose a little, and none of us have any idea of time or money.”
Mrs. Skimpole sighed, I thought, as if she would have been glad
to strike out this item in the family attainments. I also thought that
she rather impressed her sigh upon my guardian and that she took
every opportunity of throwing in another.
“It is pleasant,” said Mr. Skimpole, turning his sprightly eyes from
one to the other of us, “and it is whimsically interesting to trace
peculiarities in families. In this family we are all children, and I am
the youngest.”
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good deal of sprightly forehead, and vivacious little curls dotted about
the corners of her eyes. They were dressed to correspond, though in a
most untidy and negligent way.
Ada and I conversed with these young ladies and found them wonder-
fully like their father. In the meanwhile Mr. Jarndyce (who had been
rubbing his head to a great extent, and hinted at a change in the wind)
talked with Mrs. Skimpole in a corner, where we could not help hearing
the chink of money. Mr. Skimpole had previously volunteered to go
home with us and had withdrawn to dress himself for the purpose.
“My roses,” he said when he came back, “take care of mama. She is
poorly to-day. By going home with Mr. Jarndyce for a day or two, I
shall hear the larks sing and preserve my amiability. It has been tried,
you know, and would be tried again if I remained at home.”
“That bad man!” said the Comedy daughter.
“At the very time when he knew papa was lying ill by his
wallflowers, looking at the blue sky,” Laura complained.
“And when the smell of hay was in the air!” said Arethusa.
“It showed a want of poetry in the man,” Mr. Skimpole assented,
but with perfect good humour. “It was coarse. There was an absence
of the finer touches of humanity in it! My daughters have taken great
offence,” he explained to us, “at an honest man—”
“Not honest, papa. Impossible!” they all three protested.
“At a rough kind of fellow—a sort of human hedgehog rolled
up,” said Mr. Skimpole, “who is a baker in this neighbourhood and
from whom we borrowed a couple of armchairs. We wanted a couple
of arm-chairs, and we hadn’t got them, and therefore of course we
looked to a man who had got them, to lend them. Well! This mo-
rose person lent them, and we wore them out. When they were worn
out, he wanted them back. He had them back. He was contented,
you will say. Not at all. He objected to their being worn. I reasoned
with him, and pointed out his mistake. I said, ‘Can you, at your
time of life, be so headstrong, my friend, as to persist that an arm-
chair is a thing to put upon a shelf and look at? That it is an object to
contemplate, to survey from a distance, to consider from a point of
sight? Don’t you know that these arm-chairs were borrowed to be sat
upon?’ He was unreasonable and unpersuadable and used intemper-
ate language. Being as patient as I am at this minute, I addressed
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and had got tired of, when a card was brought in and my guardian
read aloud in a surprised voice, “Sir Leicester Dedlock!”
The visitor was in the room while it was yet turning round with
me and before I had the power to stir. If I had had it, I should have
hurried away. I had not even the presence of mind, in my giddiness,
to retire to Ada in the window, or to see the window, or to know
where it was. I heard my name and found that my guardian was
presenting me before I could move to a chair.
“Pray be seated, Sir Leicester.”
“Mr. Jarndyce,” said Sir Leicester in reply as he bowed and seated
himself, “I do myself the honour of calling here—”
“You do me the honour, Sir Leicester.”
“Thank you—of calling here on my road from Lincolnshire to
express my regret that any cause of complaint, however strong, that I
may have against a gentleman who—who is known to you and has
been your host, and to whom therefore I will make no farther refer-
ence, should have prevented you, still more ladies under your escort
and charge, from seeing whatever little there may be to gratify a po-
lite and refined taste at my house, Chesney Wold.”
“You are exceedingly obliging, Sir Leicester, and on behalf of those
ladies (who are present) and for myself, I thank you very much.”
“It is possible, Mr. Jarndyce, that the gentleman to whom, for the
reasons I have mentioned, I refrain from making further allusion—it
is possible, Mr. Jarndyce, that that gentleman may have done me the
honour so far to misapprehend my character as to induce you to
believe that you would not have been received by my local establish-
ment in Lincolnshire with that urbanity, that courtesy, which its
members are instructed to show to all ladies and gentlemen who
present themselves at that house. I merely beg to observe, sir, that the
fact is the reverse.”
My guardian delicately dismissed this remark without making any
verbal answer.
“It has given me pain, Mr. Jarndyce,” Sir Leicester weightily
proceeded. “I assure you, sir, it has given—me—pain—to learn from
the housekeeper at Chesney Wold that a gentleman who was in your
company in that part of the county, and who would appear to pos-
sess a cultivated taste for the fine arts, was likewise deterred by some
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such cause from examining the family pictures with that leisure, that
attention, that care, which he might have desired to bestow upon
them and which some of them might possibly have repaid.” Here he
produced a card and read, with much gravity and a
little trouble, through his eye-glass, “Mr. Hirrold—Herald—
Harold—Skampling—Skumpling—I beg your pardon—Skimpole.”
“This is Mr. Harold Skimpole,” said my guardian, evidently surprised.
“Oh!” exclaimed Sir Leicester, “I am happy to meet Mr. Skimpole
and to have the opportunity of tendering my personal regrets. I hope,
sir, that when you again find yourself in my part of the county, you
will be under no similar sense of restraint.”
“You are very obliging, Sir Leicester Dedlock. So encouraged, I shall
certainly give myself the pleasure and advantage of another visit to your
beautiful house. The owners of such places as Chesney Wold,” said Mr.
Skimpole with his usual happy and easy air, “are public benefactors. They
are good enough to maintain a number of delightful objects for the
admiration and pleasure of us poor men; and not to reap all the admira-
tion and pleasure that they yield is to be ungrateful to our benefactors.”
Sir Leicester seemed to approve of this sentiment highly. “An art-
ist, sir?”
“No,” returned Mr. Skimpole. “A perfectly idle man. A mere
amateur.”
Sir Leicester seemed to approve of this even more. He hoped he
might have the good fortune to be at Chesney Wold when Mr.
Skimpole next came down into Lincolnshire. Mr. Skimpole pro-
fessed himself much flattered and honoured.
“Mr. Skimpole mentioned,” pursued Sir Leicester, addressing him-
self again to my guardian, “mentioned to the house-keeper, who, as he
may have observed, is an old and attached retainer of the family—”
(“That is, when I walked through the house the other day, on the
occasion of my going down to visit Miss Summerson and Miss Clare,”
Mr. Skimpole airily explained to us.)
“—That the friend with whom he had formerly been staying there
was Mr. Jarndyce.” Sir Leicester bowed to the bearer of that name.
“And hence I became aware of the circumstance for which I have
professed my regret. That this should have occurred to any gentle-
man, Mr. Jarndyce, but especially a gentleman formerly known to
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ated with me, receiving kindnesses and obligations from her hus-
band, was so painful that I felt I could no longer guide myself
without his assistance.
When we had retired for the night, and Ada and I had had our
usual talk in our pretty room, I went out at my door again and
sought my guardian among his books. I knew he always read at that
hour, and as I drew near I saw the light shining out into the passage
from his reading-lamp.
“May I come in, guardian?”
“Surely, little woman. What’s the matter?”
“Nothing is the matter. I thought I would like to take this quiet
time of saying a word to you about myself.”
He put a chair for me, shut his book, and put it by, and turned his
kind attentive face towards me. I could not help observing that it
wore that curious expression I had observed in it once before—on
that night when he had said that he was in no trouble which I could
readily understand.
“What concerns you, my dear Esther,” said he, “concerns us all.
You cannot be more ready to speak than I am to hear.”
“I know that, guardian. But I have such need of your advice and
support. Oh! You don’t know how much need I have to-night.”
He looked unprepared for my being so earnest, and even a little
alarmed.
“Or how anxious I have been to speak to you,” said I, “ever since
the visitor was here to-day.”
“The visitor, my dear! Sir Leicester Dedlock?”
“Yes.”
He folded his arms and sat looking at me with an air of the
profoundest astonishment, awaiting what I should say next. I did
not know how to prepare him.
“Why, Esther,” said he, breaking into a smile, “our visitor and you
are the two last persons on earth I should have thought of connecting
together!”
“Oh, yes, guardian, I know it. And I too, but a little while ago.”
The smile passed from his face, and he became graver than before.
He crossed to the door to see that it was shut (but I had seen to that)
and resumed his seat before me.
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CHAPTER XLIV
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than the clerk. But after all, my dear, it was but seeking for a new
service. She had seen you and Ada a little while before, and it was
natural that you should come into her head. She merely proposed
herself for your maid, you know. She did nothing more.”
“Her manner was strange,” said I.
“Yes, and her manner was strange when she took her shoes off and
showed that cool relish for a walk that might have ended in her
death-bed,” said my guardian. “It would be useless self-distress and
torment to reckon up such chances and possibilities. There are very
few harmless circumstances that would not seem full of perilous
meaning, so considered. Be hopeful, little woman. You can be noth-
ing better than yourself; be that, through this knowledge, as you
were before you had it. It is the best you can do for everybody’s sake.
I, sharing the secret with you—”
“And lightening it, guardian, so much,” said I.
“—will be attentive to what passes in that family, so far as I can
observe it from my distance. And if the time should come when I
can stretch out a hand to render the least service to one whom it is
better not to name even here, I will not fail to do it for her dear
daughter’s sake.”
I thanked him with my whole heart. What could I ever do but
thank him! I was going out at the door when he asked me to stay a
moment. Quickly turning round, I saw that same expression on his
face again; and all at once, I don’t know how, it flashed upon me as a
new and far-off possibility that I understood it.
“My dear Esther,” said my guardian, “I have long had something
in my thoughts that I have wished to say to you.”
“Indeed?”
“I have had some difficulty in approaching it, and I still have. I
should wish it to be so deliberately said, and so deliberately consid-
ered. Would you object to my writing it?”
“Dear guardian, how could I object to your writing anything for
me to read?”
“Then see, my love,” said he with his cheery smile, “am I at this
moment quite as plain and easy—do I seem as open, as honest and
old-fashioned—as I am at any time?”
I answered in all earnestness, “Quite.” With the strictest truth, for
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his momentary hesitation was gone (it had not lasted a minute), and
his fine, sensible, cordial, sterling manner was restored.
“Do I look as if I suppressed anything, meant anything but what I
said, had any reservation at all, no matter what?” said he with his
bright clear eyes on mine.
I answered, most assuredly he did not.
“Can you fully trust me, and thoroughly rely on what I profess,
Esther?”
“Most thoroughly,” said I with my whole heart.
“My dear girl,” returned my guardian, “give me your hand.”
He took it in his, holding me lightly with his arm, and looking
down into my face with the same genuine freshness and faithfulness
of manner—the old protecting manner which had made that house
my home in a moment—said, “You have wrought changes in me,
little woman, since the winter day in the stage-coach. First and last
you have done me a world of good since that time.”
“Ah, guardian, what have you done for me since that time!”
“But,” said he, “that is not to be remembered now.”
“It never can be forgotten.”
“Yes, Esther,” said he with a gentle seriousness, “it is to be
forgotten now, to be forgotten for a while. You are only to remem-
ber now that nothing can change me as you know me. Can you feel
quite assured of that, my dear?”
“I can, and I do,” I said.
“That’s much,” he answered. “That’s everything. But I must not
take that at a word. I will not write this something in my thoughts
until you have quite resolved within yourself that nothing can change
me as you know me. If you doubt that in the least degree, I will never
write it. If you are sure of that, on good consideration, send Charley to
me this night week—’for the letter.’ But if you are not quite certain,
never send. Mind, I trust to your truth, in this thing as in everything. If
you are not quite certain on that one point, never send!”
“Guardian,” said I, “I am already certain, I can no more be changed
in that conviction than you can be changed towards me. I shall send
Charley for the letter.”
He shook my hand and said no more. Nor was any more said in
reference to this conversation, either by him or me, through the whole
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one thing to do. To devote my life to his happiness was to thank him
poorly, and what had I wished for the other night but some new
means of thanking him?
Still I cried very much, not only in the fullness of my heart after
reading the letter, not only in the strangeness of the prospect—for
it was strange though I had expected the contents—but as if some-
thing for which there was no name or distinct idea were indefi-
nitely lost to me. I was very happy, very thankful, very hopeful;
but I cried very much.
By and by I went to my old glass. My eyes were red and swollen,
and I said, “Oh, Esther, Esther, can that be you!” I am afraid the face
in the glass was going to cry again at this reproach, but I held up my
finger at it, and it stopped.
“That is more like the composed look you comforted me with,
my dear, when you showed me such a change!” said I, beginning to
let down my hair. “When you are mistress of Bleak House, you are
to be as cheerful as a bird. In fact, you are always to be cheerful; so let
us begin for once and for all.”
I went on with my hair now, quite comfortably. I sobbed a little still,
but that was because I had been crying, not because I was crying then.
“And so Esther, my dear, you are happy for life. Happy with your best
friends, happy in your old home, happy in the power of doing a great
deal of good, and happy in the undeserved love of the best of men.”
I thought, all at once, if my guardian had married some one else,
how should I have felt, and what should I have done! That would
have been a change indeed. It presented my life in such a new and
blank form that I rang my housekeeping keys and gave them a kiss
before I laid them down in their basket again.
Then I went on to think, as I dressed my hair before the glass, how often
had I considered within myself that the deep traces of my illness and the
circumstances of my birth were only new reasons why I should be busy,
busy, busy—useful, amiable, serviceable, in all honest, unpretending ways.
This was a good time, to be sure, to sit down morbidly and cry! As to its
seeming at all strange to me at first (if that were any excuse for crying,
which it was not) that I was one day to be the mistress of Bleak House,
why should it seem strange? Other people had thought of such things, if I
had not. “Don’t you remember, my plain dear,” I asked myself, looking at
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the glass, “what Mrs. Woodcourt said before those scars were there about
your marrying—”
Perhaps the name brought them to my remembrance. The dried
remains of the flowers. It would be better not to keep them now.
They had only been preserved in memory of something wholly past
and gone, but it would be better not to keep them now.
They were in a book, and it happened to be in the next room—
our sitting-room, dividing Ada’s chamber from mine. I took a candle
and went softly in to fetch it from its shelf. After I had it in my hand,
I saw my beautiful darling, through the open door, lying asleep, and
I stole in to kiss her.
It was weak in me, I know, and I could have no reason for crying;
but I dropped a tear upon her dear face, and another, and another.
Weaker than that, I took the withered flowers out and put them for
a moment to her lips. I thought about her love for Richard, though,
indeed, the flowers had nothing to do with that. Then I took them
into my own room and burned them at the candle, and they were
dust in an instant.
On entering the breakfast-room next morning, I found my guard-
ian just as usual, quite as frank, as open, and free. There being not the
least constraint in his manner, there was none (or I think there was
none) in mine. I was with him several times in the course of the
morning, in and out, when there was no one there, and I thought it
not unlikely that he might speak to me about the letter, but he did
not say a word.
So, on the next morning, and the next, and for at least a week,
over which time Mr. Skimpole prolonged his stay. I expected, every
day, that my guardian might speak to me about the letter, but he
never did.
I thought then, growing uneasy, that I ought to write an answer. I
tried over and over again in my own room at night, but I could not
write an answer that at all began like a good answer, so I thought each
night I would wait one more day. And I waited seven more days, and
he never said a word.
At last, Mr. Skimpole having departed, we three were one after-
noon going out for a ride; and I, being dressed before Ada and going
down, came upon my guardian, with his back towards me, standing
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CHAPTER XLV
In Trust
ONE MORNING WHEN I had done jingling about with my baskets of
keys, as my beauty and I were walking round and round the garden I
happened to turn my eyes towards the house and saw a long thin
shadow going in which looked like Mr. Vholes. Ada had been telling
me only that morning of her hopes that Richard might exhaust his
ardour in the Chancery suit by being so very earnest in it; and there-
fore, not to damp my dear girl’s spirits, I said nothing about Mr.
Vholes’s shadow.
Presently came Charley, lightly winding among the bushes and
tripping along the paths, as rosy and pretty as one of Flora’s atten-
dants instead of my maid, saying, “Oh, if you please, miss, would
you step and speak to Mr. Jarndyce!”
It was one of Charley’s peculiarities that whenever she was charged
with a message she always began to deliver it as soon as she beheld, at
any distance, the person for whom it was intended. Therefore I saw
Charley asking me in her usual form of words to “step and speak” to
Mr. Jarndyce long before I heard her. And when I did hear her, she
had said it so often that she was out of breath.
I told Ada I would make haste back and inquired of Charley as we
went in whether there was not a gentleman with Mr. Jarndyce. To
which Charley, whose grammar, I confess to my shame, never did
any credit to my educational powers, replied, “Yes, miss. Him as
come down in the country with Mr. Richard.”
A more complete contrast than my guardian and Mr. Vholes I
suppose there could not be. I found them looking at one another
across a table, the one so open and the other so close, the one so
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broad and upright and the other so narrow and stooping, the one
giving out what he had to say in such a rich ringing voice and the
other keeping it in in such a cold-blooded, gasping, fish-like manner
that I thought I never had seen two people so unmatched.
“You know Mr. Vholes, my dear,” said my guardian. Not with the
greatest urbanity, I must say.
Mr. Vholes rose, gloved and buttoned up as usual, and seated him-
self again, just as he had seated himself beside Richard in the gig. Not
having Richard to look at, he looked straight before him.
“Mr. Vholes,” said my guardian, eyeing his black figure as if he
were a bird of ill omen, “has brought an ugly report of our most
unfortunate Rick.” Laying a marked emphasis on “most unfortu-
nate” as if the words were rather descriptive of his connexion with
Mr. Vholes.
I sat down between them; Mr. Vholes remained immovable, ex-
cept that he secretly picked at one of the red pimples on his yellow
face with his black glove.
“And as Rick and you are happily good friends, I should like to
know,” said my guardian, “what you think, my dear. Would you be
so good as to—as to speak up, Mr. Vholes?”
Doing anything but that, Mr. Vholes observed, “I have been say-
ing that I have reason to know, Miss Summerson, as Mr. C.’s profes-
sional adviser, that Mr. C.’s circumstances are at the present moment
in an embarrassed state. Not so much in point of amount as owing
to the peculiar and pressing nature of liabilities Mr. C. has incurred
and the means he has of liquidating or meeting the same. I have
staved off many little matters for Mr. C., but there is a limit to
staving off, and we have reached it. I have made some advances out
of pocket to accommodate these unpleasantnesses, but I necessarily
look to being repaid, for I do not pretend to be a man of capital, and
I have a father to support in the Vale of Taunton, besides striving to
realize some little independence for three dear girls at home. My
apprehension is, Mr. C.’s circumstances being such, lest it should end
in his obtaining leave to part with his commission, which at all events
is desirable to be made known to his connexions.”
Mr. Vholes, who had looked at me while speaking, here emerged
into the silence he could hardly be said to have broken, so stifled was
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poor knife and fork at any time. If I was to partake of solid food at
this period of the day, I don’t know what the consequences might be.
Everything having been openly carried on, sir, I will now with your
permission take my leave.”
“And I would that you could take your leave, and we could all take
our leave, Mr. Vholes,” returned my guardian bitterly, “of a cause
you know of.”
Mr. Vholes, whose black dye was so deep from head to foot that it
had quite steamed before the fire, diffusing a very unpleasant per-
fume, made a short one-sided inclination of his head from the neck
and slowly shook it.
“We whose ambition it is to be looked upon in the light of respectable
practitioners, sir, can but put our shoulders to the wheel. We do it, sir. At
least, I do it myself; and I wish to think well of my professional brethren, one
and all. You are sensible of an obligation not to refer to me, miss, in commu-
nicating with Mr. C.?”
I said I would be careful not to do it.
“Just so, miss. Good morning. Mr. Jarndyce, good morning, sir.”
Mr. Vholes put his dead glove, which scarcely seemed to have any
hand in it, on my fingers, and then on my guardian’s fingers, and
took his long thin shadow away. I thought of it on the outside of the
coach, passing over all the sunny landscape between us and London,
chilling the seed in the ground as it glided along.
Of course it became necessary to tell Ada where I was going and
why I was going, and of course she was anxious and distressed. But
she was too true to Richard to say anything but words of pity and
words of excuse, and in a more loving spirit still—my dear devoted
girl!—she wrote him a long letter, of which I took charge.
Charley was to be my travelling companion, though I am sure I
wanted none and would willingly have left her at home. We all went
to London that afternoon, and finding two places in the mail, se-
cured them. At our usual bed-time, Charley and I were rolling away
seaward with the Kentish letters.
It was a night’s journey in those coach times, but we had the mail
to ourselves and did not find the night very tedious. It passed with
me as I suppose it would with most people under such circumstances.
At one while my journey looked hopeful, and at another hopeless.
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those points. I told her, too, how people in such voyages were some-
times wrecked and cast on rocks, where they were saved by the
intrepidity and humanity of one man. And Charley asking how
that could be, I told her how we knew at home of such a case.
I had thought of sending Richard a note saying I was there, but it
seemed so much better to go to him without preparation. As he
lived in barracks I was a little doubtful whether this was feasible, but
we went out to reconnoitre. Peeping in at the gate of the barrack-
yard, we found everything very quiet at that time in the morning,
and I asked a sergeant standing on the guardhouse-steps where he
lived. He sent a man before to show me, who went up some bare
stairs, and knocked with his knuckles at a door, and left us.
“Now then!” cried Richard from within. So I left Charley in the
little passage, and going on to the half-open door, said, “Can I come
in, Richard? It’s only Dame Durden.”
He was writing at a table, with a great confusion of clothes, tin
cases, books, boots, brushes, and portmanteaus strewn all about the
floor. He was only half dressed—in plain clothes, I observed, not in
uniform—and his hair was unbrushed, and he looked as wild as his
room. All this I saw after he had heartily welcomed me and I was
seated near him, for he started upon hearing my voice and caught me
in his arms in a moment. Dear Richard! He was ever the same to me.
Down to—ah, poor poor fellow!—to the end, he never received me
but with something of his old merry boyish manner.
“Good heaven, my dear little woman,” said he, “how do you come
here? Who could have thought of seeing you! Nothing the matter?
Ada is well?”
“Quite well. Lovelier than ever, Richard!”
“Ah!” he said, lenning back in his chair. “My poor cousin! I was
writing to you, Esther.”
So worn and haggard as he looked, even in the fullness of his hand-
some youth, leaning back in his chair and crushing the closely writ-
ten sheet of paper in his hand!
“Have you been at the trouble of writing all that, and am I not to
read it after all?” I asked.
“Oh, my dear,” he returned with a hopeless gesture. “You may read
it in the whole room. It is all over here.”
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his two hands—to hide his face from me. In a little while he rose as
if the light were bad and went to the window. He finished reading it
there, with his back towards me, and after he had finished and had
folded it up, stood there for some minutes with the letter in his
hand. When he came back to his chair, I saw tears in his eyes.
“Of course, Esther, you know what she says here?” He spoke in a
softened voice and kissed the letter as he asked me.
“Yes, Richard.”
“Offers me,” he went on, tapping his foot upon the floor, “the
little inheritance she is certain of so soon—just as little and as much
as I have wasted—and begs and prays me to take it, set myself right
with it, and remain in the service.”
“I know your welfare to be the dearest wish of her heart,” said I.
“And, oh, my dear Richard, Ada’s is a noble heart.”
“I am sure it is. I—I wish I was dead!”
He went back to the window, and laying his arm across it, leaned
his head down on his arm. It greatly affected me to see him so, but I
hoped he might become more yielding, and I remained silent. My
experience was very limited; I was not at all prepared for his rousing
himself out of this emotion to a new sense of injury.
“And this is the heart that the same John Jarndyce, who is not
otherwise to be mentioned between us, stepped in to estrange from
me,” said he indignantly. “And the dear girl makes me this generous
offer from under the same John Jarndyce’s roof, and with the same
John Jarndyce’s gracious consent and connivance, I dare say, as a new
means of buying me off.”
“Richard!” I cried out, rising hastily. “I will not hear you say such
shameful words!” I was very angry with him indeed, for the first
time in my life, but it only lasted a moment. When I saw his worn
young face looking at me as if he were sorry, I put my hand on his
shoulder and said, “If you please, my dear Richard, do not speak in
such a tone to me. Consider!”
He blamed himself exceedingly and told me in the most generous
manner that he had been very wrong and that he begged my pardon
a thousand times. At that I laughed, but trembled a little too, for I
was rather fluttered after being so fiery.
“To accept this offer, my dear Esther,” said he, sitting down
beside me and resuming our conversation, “—once more, pray, pray
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“You have been in shipwreck and peril since you left us, Mr.
Woodcourt,” said I, “but we can hardly call that a misfortune which
enabled you to be so useful and so brave. We read of it with the truest
interest. It first came to my knowledge through your old patient, poor
Miss Flite, when I was recovering from my severe illness.”
“Ah! Little Miss Flite!” he said. “She lives the same life yet?”
“Just the same.”
I was so comfortable with myself now as not to mind the veil and
to be able to put it aside.
“Her gratitude to you, Mr. Woodcourt, is delightful. She is a most
affectionate creature, as I have reason to say.”
“You—you have found her so?” he returned. “I—I am glad of that.”
He was so very sorry for me that he could scarcely speak.
“I assure you,” said I, “that I was deeply touched by her sympathy
and pleasure at the time I have referred to.”
“I was grieved to hear that you had been very ill.”
“I was very ill.”
“But you have quite recovered?”
“I have quite recovered my health and my cheerfulness,” said I. “You
know how good my guardian is and what a happy life we lead, and I
have everything to be thankful for and nothing in the world to desire.”
I felt as if he had greater commiseration for me than I had ever had
for myself. It inspired me with new fortitude and new calmness to
find that it was I who was under the necessity of reassuring him. I
spoke to him of his voyage out and home, and of his future plans,
and of his probable return to India. He said that was very doubtful.
He had not found himself more favoured by fortune there than here.
He had gone out a poor ship’s surgeon and had come home nothing
better. While we were talking, and when I was glad to believe that I
had alleviated (if I may use such a term) the shock he had had in
seeing me, Richard came in. He had heard downstairs who was with
me, and they met with cordial pleasure.
I saw that after their first greetings were over, and when they spoke
of Richard’s career, Mr. Woodcourt had a perception that all was not
going well with him. He frequently glanced at his face as if there
were something in it that gave him pain, and more than once he
looked towards me as though he sought to ascertain whether I knew
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what the truth was. Yet Richard was in one of his sanguine states and
in good spirits and was thoroughly pleased to see Mr. Woodcourt
again, whom he had always liked.
Richard proposed that we all should go to London together; but
Mr. Woodcourt, having to remain by his ship a little longer, could
not join us. He dined with us, however, at an early hour, and became
so much more like what he used to be that I was still more at peace
to think I had been able to soften his regrets. Yet his mind was not
relieved of Richard. When the coach was almost ready and Richard
ran down to look after his luggage, he spoke to me about him.
I was not sure that I had a right to lay his whole story open, but I
referred in a few words to his estrangement from Mr Jarndyce and to
his being entangled in the ill-fated Chancery suit. Mr. Woodcourt
listened with interest and expressed his regret.
“I saw you observe him rather closely,” said I, “Do you think him
so changed?”
“He is changed,” he returned, shaking his head.
I felt the blood rush into my face for the first time, but it was only
an instantaneous emotion. I turned my head aside, and it was gone.
“It is not,” said Mr. Woodcourt, “his being so much younger or
older, or thinner or fatter, or paler or ruddier, as there being upon his
face such a singular expression. I never saw so remarkable a look in a
young person. One cannot say that it is all anxiety or all weariness;
yet it is both, and like ungrown despair.”
“You do not think he is ill?” said I.
No. He looked robust in body.
“That he cannot be at peace in mind, we have too much reason to
know,” I proceeded. “Mr. Woodcourt, you are going to London?”
“To-morrow or the next day.”
“There is nothing Richard wants so much as a friend. He always
liked you. Pray see him when you get there. Pray help him some-
times with your companionship if you can. You do not know of
what service it might be. You cannot think how Ada, and Mr.
Jarndyce, and even I—how we should all thank you, Mr. Woodcourt!”
“Miss Summerson,” he said, more moved than he had been from
the first, “before heaven, I will be a true friend to him! I will accept
him as a trust, and it shall be a sacred one!”
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“God bless you!” said I, with my eyes filling fast; but I thought they
might, when it was not for myself. “Ada loves him—we all love him,
but Ada loves him as we cannot. I will tell her what you say. Thank you,
and God bless you, in her name!”
Richard came back as we finished exchanging these hurried words
and gave me his arm to take me to the coach.
“Woodcourt,” he said, unconscious with what application, “pray
let us meet in London!”
“Meet?” returned the other. “I have scarcely a friend there now but
you. Where shall I find you?”
“Why, I must get a lodging of some sort,” said Richard, ponder-
ing. “Say at Vholes’s, Symond’s Inn.”
“Good! Without loss of time.”
They shook hands heartily. When I was seated in the coach and
Richard was yet standing in the street, Mr. Woodcourt laid his friendly
hand on Richard’s shoulder and looked at me. I understood him and
waved mine in thanks.
And in his last look as we drove away, I saw that he was very sorry
for me. I was glad to see it. I felt for my old self as the dead may feel
if they ever revisit these scenes. I was glad to be tenderly remem-
bered, to be gently pitied, not to be quite forgotten.
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CHAPTER XLVI
Stop Him!
DARKNESS RESTS UPON Tom-All-Alone’s. Dilating and dilating since
the sun went down last night, it has gradually swelled until it fills
every void in the place. For a time there were some dungeon lights
burning, as the lamp of life hums in Tom-all-Alone’s, heavily, heavily,
in the nauseous air, and winking—as that lamp, too, winks in Tom-
all-Alone’s—at many horrible things. But they are blotted out. The
moon has eyed Tom with a dull cold stare, as admitting some puny
emulation of herself in his desert region unfit for life and blasted
by volcanic fires; but she has passed on and is gone. The blackest
nightmare in the infernal stables grazes on Tom-all-Alone’s, and
Tom is fast asleep.
Much mighty speech-making there has been, both in and out of
Parliament, concerning Tom, and much wrathful disputation how
Tom shall be got right. Whether he shall be put into the main road
by constables, or by beadles, or by bell-ringing, or by force of figures,
or by correct principles of taste, or by high church, or by low church,
or by no church; whether he shall be set to splitting trusses of po-
lemical straws with the crooked knife of his mind or whether he
shall be put to stone-breaking instead. In the midst of which dust
and noise there is but one thing perfectly clear, to wit, that Tom only
may and can, or shall and will, be reclaimed according to somebody’s
theory but nobody’s practice. And in the hopeful meantime, Tom
goes to perdition head foremost in his old determined spirit.
But he has his revenge. Even the winds are his messengers, and they
serve him in these hours of darkness. There is not a drop of Tom’s
corrupted blood but propagates infection and contagion somewhere.
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It shall pollute, this very night, the choice stream (in which chemists
on analysis would find the genuine nobility) of a Norman house, and
his Grace shall not be able to say nay to the infamous alliance. There is
not an atom of Tom’s slime, not a cubic inch of any pestilential gas in
which he lives, not one obscenity or degradation about him, not an
ignorance, not a wickedness, not a brutality of his committing, but
shall work its retribution through every order of society up to the
proudest of the proud and to the highest of the high. Verily, what with
tainting, plundering, and spoiling, Tom has his revenge.
It is a moot point whether Tom-all-Alone’s be uglier by day or by
night, but on the argument that the more that is seen of it the more
shocking it must be, and that no part of it left to the imagination is
at all likely to be made so bad as the reality, day carries it. The day
begins to break now; and in truth it might be better for the national
glory even that the sun should sometimes set upon the British do-
minions than that it should ever rise upon so vile a wonder as Tom.
A brown sunburnt gentleman, who appears in some inaptitude
for sleep to be wandering abroad rather than counting the hours on a
restless pillow, strolls hitherward at this quiet time. Attracted by cu-
riosity, he often pauses and looks about him, up and down the mis-
erable by-ways. Nor is he merely curious, for in his bright dark eye
there is compassionate interest; and as he looks here and there, he
seems to understand such wretchedness and to have studied it before.
On the banks of the stagnant channel of mud which is the main
street of Tom-all-Alone’s, nothing is to be seen but the crazy houses,
shut up and silent. No waking creature save himself appears except in
one direction, where he sees the solitary figure of a woman sitting on
a door-step. He walks that way. Approaching, he observes that she
has journeyed a long distance and is footsore and travel-stained. She
sits on the door-step in the manner of one who is waiting, with her
elbow on her knee and her head upon her hand. Beside her is a canvas
bag, or bundle, she has carried. She is dozing probably, for she gives
no heed to his steps as he comes toward her.
The broken footway is so narrow that when Allan Woodcourt
comes to where the woman sits, he has to turn into the road to pass
her. Looking down at her face, his eye meets hers, and he stops.
“What is the matter?”
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“Nothing, sir.”
“Can’t you make them hear? Do you want to be let in?”
“I’m walting till they get up at another house—a lodging-house—
not here,” the woman patiently returns. “I’m waiting here because
there will be sun here presently to warm me.”
“I am afraid you are tired. I am sorry to see you sitting in the
street.”
“Thank you, sir. It don’t matter.”
A habit in him of speaking to the poor and of avoiding patronage
or condescension or childishness (which is the favourite device, many
people deeming it quite a subtlety to talk to them like little spelling
books) has put him on good terms with the woman easily.
“Let me look at your forehead,” he says, bending down. “I am a
doctor. Don’t be afraid. I wouldn’t hurt you for the world.”
He knows that by touching her with his skilful and accustomed
hand he can soothe her yet more readily. She makes a slight objec-
tion, saying, “It’s nothing”; but he has scarcely laid his fingers on the
wounded place when she lifts it up to the light.
“Aye! A bad bruise, and the skin sadly broken. This must be very
sore.”
“It do ache a little, sir,” returns the woman with a started tear upon
her cheek.
“Let me try to make it more comfortable. My handkerchief won’t
hurt you.”
“Oh, dear no, sir, I’m sure of that!”
He cleanses the injured place and dries it, and having carefully ex-
amined it and gently pressed it with the palm of his hand, takes a
small case from his pocket, dresses it, and binds it up. While he is
thus employed, he says, after laughing at his establishing a surgery in
the street, “And so your husband is a brickmaker?”
“How do you know that, sir?” asks the woman, astonished.
“Why, I suppose so from the colour of the clay upon your bag and
on your dress. And I know brickmakers go about working at piece-
work in different places. And I am sorry to say I have known them
cruel to their wives too.”
The woman hastily lifts up her eyes as if she would deny that her
injury is referable to such a cause. But feeling the hand upon her
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forehead, and seeing his busy and composed face, she quietly drops
them again.
“Where is he now?” asks the surgeon.
“He got into trouble last night, sir; but he’ll look for me at the
lodging-house.”
“He will get into worse trouble if he often misuses his large and
heavy hand as he has misused it here. But you forgive him, brutal as
he is, and I say no more of him, except that I wish he deserved it. You
have no young child?”
The woman shakes her head. “One as I calls mine, sir, but it’s
Liz’s.”
“Your own is dead. I see! Poor little thing!”
By this time he has finished and is putting up his case. “I
suppose you have some settled home. Is it far from here?” he asks,
good-humouredly making light of what he has done as she gets up
and curtsys.
“It’s a good two or three and twenty mile from here, sir. At Saint
Albans. You know Saint Albans, sir? I thought you gave a start like,
as if you did.”
“Yes, I know something of it. And now I will ask you a question
in return. Have you money for your lodging?”
“Yes, sir,” she says, “really and truly.” And she shows it. He tells
her, in acknowledgment of her many subdued thanks, that she is
very welcome, gives her good day, and walks away. Tom-all-Alone’s
is still asleep, and nothing is astir.
Yes, something is! As he retraces his way to the point from which
he descried the woman at a distance sitting on the step, he sees a
ragged figure coming very cautiously along, crouching close to the
soiled walls—which the wretchedest figure might as well avoid—
and furtively thrusting a hand before it. It is the figure of a youth
whose face is hollow and whose eyes have an emaciated glare. He is
so intent on getting along unseen that even the apparition of a stranger
in whole garments does not tempt him to look back. He shades his
face with his ragged elbow as he passes on the other side of the way,
and goes shrinking and creeping on with his anxious hand before
him and his shapeless clothes hanging in shreds. Clothes made for
what purpose, or of what material, it would be impossible to say.
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addressing the woman, that he never known about the young lady,
that he never heern about it, that he never went fur to hurt her, that
he would sooner have hurt his own self, that he’d sooner have had his
unfortnet ed chopped off than ever gone a-nigh her, and that she wos
wery good to him, she wos. Conducting himself throughout as if in
his poor fashion he really meant it, and winding up with some very
miserable sobs.
Allan Woodcourt sees that this is not a sham. He constrains him-
self to touch him. “Come, Jo. Tell me.”
“No. I dustn’t,” says Jo, relapsing into the profile state. “I
dustn’t, or I would.”
“But I must know,” returns the other, “all the same. Come, Jo.”
After two or three such adjurations, Jo lifts up his head again,
looks round the court again, and says in a low voice, “Well, I’ll tell
you something. I was took away. There!”
“Took away? In the night?”
“Ah!” Very apprehensive of being overheard, Jo looks about him
and even glances up some ten feet at the top of the hoarding and
through the cracks in it lest the object of his distrust should be look-
ing over or hidden on the other side.
“Who took you away?”
“I dustn’t name him,” says Jo. “I dustn’t do it, sir.
“But I want, in the young lady’s name, to know. You may trust
me. No one else shall hear.”
“Ah, but I don’t know,” replies Jo, shaking his head fearfulty, “as
he don’t hear.”
“Why, he is not in this place.”
“Oh, ain’t he though?” says Jo. “He’s in all manner of places, all at
wanst.”
Allan looks at him in perplexity, but discovers some real meaning
and good faith at the bottom of this bewildering reply. He patiently
awaits an explicit answer; and Jo, more baffled by his patience than
by anything else, at last desperately whispers a name in his ear.
“Aye!” says Allan. “Why, what had you been doing?”
“Nothink, sir. Never done nothink to get myself into no trouble,
‘sept in not moving on and the inkwhich. But I’m a-moving on
now. I’m a-moving on to the berryin ground—that’s the move as
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I’m up to.”
“No, no, we will try to prevent that. But what did he do with
you?”
“Put me in a horsepittle,” replied Jo, whispering, “till I was dis-
charged, then giv me a little money—four half-bulls, wot you may
call half-crowns—and ses ‘Hook it! Nobody wants you here,’ he ses.
‘You hook it. You go and tramp,’ he ses. ‘You move on,’ he ses.
‘Don’t let me ever see you nowheres within forty mile of London, or
you’ll repent it.’ So I shall, if ever he doos see me, and he’ll see me if
I’m above ground,” concludes Jo, nervously repeating all his former
precautions and investigations.
Allan considers a little, then remarks, turning to the woman but
keeping an encouraging eye on Jo, “He is not so ungrateful as you
supposed. He had a reason for going away, though it was an insuffi-
cient one.”
“Thankee, sir, thankee!” exclaims Jo. “There now! See how hard you
wos upon me. But ony you tell the young lady wot the genlmn ses, and
it’s all right. For you wos wery good to me too, and I knows it.”
“Now, Jo,” says Allan, keeping his eye upon him, “come with me
and I will find you a better place than this to lie down and hide in. If
I take one side of the way and you the other to avoid observation,
you will not run away, I know very well, if you make me a promise.”
“I won’t, not unless I wos to see him a-coming, sir.”
“Very well. I take your word. Half the town is getting up by this
time, and the whole town will be broad awake in another hour. Come
along. Good day again, my good woman.”
“Good day again, sir, and I thank you kindly many times again.”
She has been sitting on her bag, deeply attentive, and now rises
and takes it up. Jo, repeating, “Ony you tell the young lady as I never
went fur to hurt her and wot the genlmn ses!” nods and shambles
and shivers, and smears and blinks, and half laughs and half cries, a
farewell to her, and takes his creeping way along after Allan Woodcourt,
close to the houses on the opposite side of the street. In this order,
the two come up out of Tom-all-Alone’s into the broad rays of the
sunlight and the purer air.
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CHAPTER XLVII
Jo’s Will
AS ALLAN WOODCOURT AND JO proceed along the streets where the
high church spires and the distances are so near and clear in the morn-
ing light that the city itself seems renewed by rest, Allan revolves in
his mind how and where he shall bestow his companion. “It surely is
a strange fact,” he considers, “that in the heart of a civilized world this
creature in human form should be more difficult to dispose of than
an unowned dog.” But it is none the less a fact because of its strange-
ness, and the difficulty remains.
At first he looks behind him often to assure himself that Jo is still
really following. But look where he will, he still beholds him close
to the opposite houses, making his way with his wary hand from
brick to brick and from door to door, and often, as he creeps along,
glancing over at him watchfully. Soon satisfied that the last thing in
his thoughts is to give him the slip, Allan goes on, considering with
a less divided attention what he shall do.
A breakfast-stall at a street-corner suggests the first thing to be
done. He stops there, looks round, and beckons Jo. Jo crosses and
comes halting and shuffling up, slowly scooping the knuckles of his
right hand round and round in the hollowed palm of his left, knead-
ing dirt with a natural pestle and mortar. What is a dainty repast to
Jo is then set before him, and he begins to gulp the coffee and to
gnaw the bread and butter, looking anxiously about him in all direc-
tions as he eats and drinks, like a scared animal.
But he is so sick and miserable that even hunger has abandoned
him. “I thought I was amost a-starvin, sir,” says Jo, soon putting
down his food, “but I don’t know nothink—not even that. I don’t
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care for eating wittles nor yet for drinking on ‘em.” And Jo stands
shivering and looking at the breakfast wonderingly.
Allan Woodcourt lays his hand upon his pulse and on his chest.
“Draw breath, Jo!” “It draws,” says Jo, “as heavy as a cart.” He might
add, “And rattles like it,” but he only mutters, “I’m a-moving on, sir.”
Allan looks about for an apothecary’s shop. There is none at hand,
but a tavern does as well or better. He obtains a little measure of wine
and gives the lad a portion of it very carefully. He begins to revive
almost as soon as it passes his lips. “We may repeat that dose, Jo,”
observes Allan after watching him with his attentive face. “So! Now
we will take five minutes’ rest, and then go on again.”
Leaving the boy sitting on the bench of the breakfast-stall, with
his back against an iron railing, Allan Woodcourt paces up and down
in the early sunshine, casting an occasional look towards him with-
out appearing to watch him. It requires no discernment to perceive
that he is warmed and refreshed. If a face so shaded can brighten, his
face brightens somewhat; and by little and little he eats the slice of
bread he had so hopelessly laid down. Observant of these signs of
improvement, Allan engages him in conversation and elicits to his
no small wonder the adventure of the lady in the veil, with all its
consequences. Jo slowly munches as he slowly tells it. When he has
finished his story and his bread, they go on again.
Intending to refer his difficulty in finding a temporary place of
refuge for the boy to his old patient, zealous little Miss Flite, Allan
leads the way to the court where he and Jo first foregathered. But all
is changed at the rag and bottle shop; Miss Flite no longer lodges
there; it is shut up; and a hard-featured female, much obscured by
dust, whose age is a problem, but who is indeed no other than the
interesting Judy, is tart and spare in her replies. These sufficing, how-
ever, to inform the visitor that Miss Flite and her birds are domiciled
with a Mrs. Blinder, in Bell Yard, he repairs to that neighbouring
place, where Miss Flite (who rises early that she may be punctual at
the divan of justice held by her excellent friend the Chancellor) comes
running downstairs with tears of welcome and with open arms.
“My dear physician!” cries Miss Flite. “My meritorious, distin-
guished, honourable officer!” She uses some odd expressions, but is
as cordial and full of heart as sanity itself can be—more so than it
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often is. Allan, very patient with her, waits until she has no more
raptures to express, then points out Jo, trembling in a doorway, and
tells her how he comes there.
“Where can I lodge him hereabouts for the present? Now, you
have a fund of knowledge and good sense and can advise me.
Miss Flite, mighty proud of the compliment, sets herself to con-
sider; but it is long before a bright thought occurs to her. Mrs. Blinder
is entirely let, and she herself occupies poor Gridley’s room. “Gridley!”
exclaims Miss Flite, clapping her hands after a twentieth repetition
of this remark. “Gridley! To be sure! Of course! My dear physician!
General George will help us out.”
It is hopeless to ask for any information about General George,
and would be, though Miss Flite had not akeady run upstairs to put
on her pinched bonnet and her poor little shawl and to arm herself
with her reticule of documents. But as she informs her physician in
her disjointed manner on coming down in full array that General
George, whom she often calls upon, knows her dear Fitz Jarndyce
and takes a great interest in all connected with her, Allan is induced
to think that they may be in the right way. So he tells Jo, for his
encouragement, that this walking about will soon be over now; and
they repair to the general’s. Fortunately it is not far.
From the exterior of George’s Shooting Gallery, and the long entry,
and the bare perspective beyond it, Allan Woodcourt augurs well. He
also descries promise in the figure of Mr. George himself, striding to-
wards them in his mornmg exercise with his pipe in his mouth, no
stock on, and his muscular arms, developed by broadsword and dumb-
bell, weightily asserting themselves through his light shirt-sleeves.
“Your servant, sir,” says Mr. George with a military salute. Good-
humouredly smiling all over his broad forehead up into his crisp
hair, he then defers to Miss Flite, as, with great stateliness, and at
some length, she performs the courtly ceremony of presentation. He
winds it up with another “Your servant, sir!” and another salute.
“Excuse me, sir. A sailor, I believe?” says Mr. George.
“I am proud to find I have the air of one,” returns Allan; “but I am
only a sea-going doctor.”
“Indeed, sir! I should have thought you was a regular blue-jacket
myself.”
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Allan hopes Mr. George will forgive his intrusion the more readily
on that account, and particularly that he will not lay aside his pipe,
which, in his politeness, he has testifled some intention of doing.
“You are very good, sir,” returns the trooper. “As I know by experi-
ence that it’s not disagreeable to Miss Flite, and since it’s equally
agreeable to yourself—” and finishes the sentence by putting it be-
tween his lips again. Allan proceeds to tell him all he knows about
Jo, unto which the trooper listens with a grave face.
“And that’s the lad, sir, is it?” he inquires, looking along the entry
to where Jo stands staring up at the great letters on the whitewashed
front, which have no meaning in his eyes.
“That’s he,” says Allan. “And, Mr. George, I am in this difficulty about
him. I am unwilling to place him in a hospital, even if I could procure
him immediate admission, because I foresee that he would not stay there
many hours if he could be so much as got there. The same objection
applies to a workhouse, supposing I had the patience to be evaded and
shirked, and handed about from post to pillar in trying to get him into
one, which is a system that I don’t take kindly to.”
“No man does, sir,” returns Mr. George.
“I am convinced that he would not remain in either place, because
he is possessed by an extraordinary terror of this person who ordered
him to keep out of the way; in his ignorance, he believes this person
to be everywhere, and cognizant of everything.”
“I ask your pardon, sir,” says Mr. George. “But you have not men-
tioned that party’s name. Is it a secret, sir?”
“The boy makes it one. But his name is Bucket.”
“Bucket the detective, sir?”
“The same man.”
“The man is known to me, sir,” returns the trooper after blowing
out a cloud of smoke and squaring his chest, “and the boy is so far
correct that he undoubtedly is a—rum customer.” Mr. George smokes
with a profound meaning after this and surveys Miss Flite in silence.
“Now, I wish Mr. Jarndyce and Miss Summerson at least to know
that this Jo, who tells so strange a story, has reappeared, and to have
it in their power to speak with him if they should desire to do so.
Therefore I want to get him, for the present moment, into any poor
lodging kept by decent people where he would be admitted. Decent
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people and Jo, Mr. George,” says Allan, following the direction of
the trooper’s eyes along the entry, “have not been much acquainted,
as you see. Hence the difficulty. Do you happen to know any one in
this neighbourhood who would receive him for a while on my pay-
ing for him beforehand?”
As he puts the question, he becomes aware of a dirty-faced little
man standing at the trooper’s elbow and looking up, with an oddly
twisted figure and countenance, into the trooper’s face. After a few
more puffs at his pipe, the trooper looks down askant at the little
man, and the little man winks up at the trooper.
“Well, sir,” says Mr. George, “I can assure you that I would
willingiy be knocked on the head at any time if it would be at all
agreeable to Miss Summerson, and consequently I esteem it a privilege
to do that young lady any service, however small. We are naturally in
the vagabond way here, sir, both myself and Phil. You see what the
place is. You are welcome to a quiet corner of it for the boy if the same
would meet your views. No charge made, except for rations. We are
not in a flourishing state of circumstances here, sir. We are liable to be
tumbled out neck and crop at a moment’s notice. However, sir, such as
the place is, and so long as it lasts, here it is at your service.”
With a comprehensive wave of his pipe, Mr. George places the
whole building at his visitor’s disposal.
“I take it for granted, sir,” he adds, “you being one of the
medical staff, that there is no present infection about this unfortu-
nate subject?”
Allan is quite sure of it.
“Because, sir,” says Mr. George, shaking his head sorrowfully, “we
have had enough of that.”
His tone is no less sorrowfully echoed by his new acquaintance. ‘Still I am
bound to tell you,” observes Allan after repeating his former assurance, “that
the boy is deplorably low and reduced and that he may be—I do not say that
he is—too far gone to recover.”
“Do you consider him in present danger, sir?” inquires the trooper.
“Yes, I fear so.”
“Then, sir,” returns the trooper in a decisive manner, “it appears to
me—being naturally in the vagabond way myself—that the sooner
he comes out of the street, the better. You, Phil! Bring him in!”
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Mr. Squod tacks out, all on one side, to execute the word of com-
mand; and the trooper, having smoked his pipe, lays it by. Jo is brought
in. He is not one of Mrs. Pardiggle’s Tockahoopo Indians; he is not
one of Mrs. Jellyby’s lambs, being wholly unconnected with
Borrioboola-Gha; he is not softened by distance and unfamiliarity; he
is not a genuine foreign-grown savage; he is the ordinary home-made
article. Dirty, ugly, disagreeable to all the senses, in body a common
creature of the common streets, only in soul a heathen. Homely filth
begrimes him, homely parasites devour him, homely sores are in him,
homely rags are on him; native ignorance, the growth of English soil
and climate, sinks his immortal nature lower than the beasts that per-
ish. Stand forth, Jo, in uncompromising colours! From the sole of thy
foot to the crown of thy head, there is nothing interesting about thee.
He shuffles slowly into Mr. George’s gallery and stands huddled
together in a bundle, looking all about the floor. He seems to know
that they have an inclination to shrink from him, partly for what he is
and partly for what he has caused. He, too, shrinks from them. He is
not of the same order of things, not of the same place in creation. He
is of no order and no place, neither of the beasts nor of humanity.
“Look here, Jo!” says Allan. “This is Mr. George.”
Jo searches the floor for some time longer, then looks up for a
moment, and then down again.
“He is a kind friend to you, for he is going to give you lodging
room here.”
Jo makes a scoop with one hand, which is supposed to be a bow.
After a little more consideration and some backing and changing of
the foot on which he rests, he mutters that he is “wery thankful.”
“You are quite safe here. All you have to do at present is to be
obedient and to get strong. And mind you tell us the truth here,
whatever you do, Jo.”
“Wishermaydie if I don’t, sir,” says Jo, reverting to his favourite
declaration. “I never done nothink yit, but wot you knows on, to get
myself into no trouble. I never was in no other trouble at all, sir, ‘sept
not knowin’ nothink and starwation.”
“I believe it, now attend to Mr. George. I see he is going to speak
to you.”
“My intention merely was, sir,” observes Mr. George, amazingly
broad and upright, “to point out to him where he can lie down and
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get a thorough good dose of sleep. Now, look here.” As the trooper
speaks, he conducts them to the other end of the gallery and opens
one of the little cabins. “There you are, you see! Here is a mattress,
and here you may rest, on good behaviour, as long as Mr., I ask your
pardon, sir”—he refers apologetically to the card Allan has given
him—”Mr. Woodcourt pleases. Don’t you be alarmed if you hear
shots; they’ll be aimed at the target, and not you. Now, there’s an-
other thing I would recommend, sir,” says the trooper, turning to his
visitor. “Phil, come here!”
Phil bears down upon them according to his usual tactics. “Here is
a man, sir, who was found, when a baby, in the gutter. Consequently,
it is to be expected that he takes a natural interest in this poor crea-
ture. You do, don’t you, Phil?”
“Certainly and surely I do, guv’ner,” is Phil’s reply.
“Now I was thinking, sir,” says Mr. George in a martial sort of
confidence, as if he were giving his opinion in a council of war at a
drum-head, “that if this man was to take him to a bath and was to lay
out a few shillings in getting him one or two coarse articles—”
“Mr. George, my considerate friend,” returns Allan, taking out his
purse, “it is the very favour I would have asked.”
Phil Squod and Jo are sent out immediately on this work of im-
provement. Miss Flite, quite enraptured by her success, makes the
best of her way to court, having great fears that otherwise her friend
the Chancellor may be uneasy about her or may give the judgment
she has so long expected in her absence, and observing “which you
know, my dear physician, and general, after so many years, would be
too absurdly unfortunate!” Allan takes the opportunity of going out
to procure some restorative medicines, and obtaining them near at
hand, soon returns to find the trooper walking up and down the
gallery, and to fall into step and walk with him.
“I take it, sir,” says Mr. George, “that you know Miss Summerson
pretty well?”
Yes, it appears.
“Not related to her, sir?”
No, it appears.
“Excuse the apparent curiosity,” says Mr. George. “It seemed to
me probable that you might take more than a common interest in
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this poor creature because Miss Summerson had taken that unfortu-
nate interest in him. ’Tis my case, sir, I assure you.”
“And mine, Mr. George.”
The trooper looks sideways at Allan’s sunburnt cheek and bright
dark eye, rapidly measures his height and build, and seems to ap-
prove of him.
“Since you have been out, sir, I have been thinking that I unques-
tionably know the rooms in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, where Bucket took
the lad, according to his account. Though he is not acquainted with
the name, I can help you to it. It’s Tulkinghorn. That’s what it is.”
Allan looks at him inquiringly, repeating the name.
“Tulkinghorn. That’s the name, sir. I know the man, and know
him to have been in communication with Bucket before, respecting
a deceased person who had given him offence. I know the man, sir.
To my sorrow.”
Allan naturally asks what kind of man he is.
“What kind of man! Do you mean to look at?”
“I think I know that much of him. I mean to deal with. Generally,
what kind of man?”
“Why, then I’ll tell you, sir,” returns the trooper, stopping short
and folding his arms on his square chest so angrily that his face fires
and flushes all over; “he is a confoundedly bad kind of man. He is a
slow-torturing kind of man. He is no more like flesh and blood than
a rusty old carbine is. He is a kind of man—by George!—that has
caused me more restlessness, and more uneasiness, and more dissatis-
faction with myself than all other men put together. That’s the kind
of man Mr. Tulkinghorn is!”
“I am sorry,” says Allan, “to have touched so sore a place.”
“Sore?” The trooper plants his legs wider apart, wets the palm of his
broad right hand, and lays it on the imaginary moustache. “It’s no fault
of yours, sir; but you shall judge. He has got a power over me. He is
the man I spoke of just now as being able to tumble me out of this
place neck and crop. He keeps me on a constant see-saw. He won’t
hold off, and he won’t come on. If I have a payment to make him, or
time to ask him for, or anything to go to him about, he don’t see me,
don’t hear me—passes me on to Melchisedech’s in Clifford’s Inn,
Melchisedech’s in Clifford’s Inn passes me back again to him—he keeps
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“Mr. Sangsby,” says Jo, “I went and giv a illness to the lady as wos
and yit as warn’t the t’other lady, and none of ‘em never says nothink
to me for having done it, on accounts of their being ser good and my
having been s’unfortnet. The lady come herself and see me yesday,
and she ses, ‘Ah, Jo!’ she ses. ‘We thought we’d lost you, Jo!’ she ses.
And she sits down a-smilin so quiet, and don’t pass a word nor yit a
look upon me for having done it, she don’t, and I turns agin the wall,
I doos, Mr. Sangsby. And Mr. Jarnders, I see him a-forced to turn
away his own self. And Mr. Woodcot, he come fur to giv me
somethink fur to ease me, wot he’s allus a-doin’ on day and night,
and wen he come a-bending over me and a-speakin up so bold, I see
his tears a-fallin, Mr. Sangsby.”
The softened stationer deposits another half-crown on the table.
Nothing less than a repetition of that infallible remedy will relieve
his feelings.
“Wot I was a-thinkin on, Mr. Sangsby,” proceeds Jo, “wos, as you
wos able to write wery large, p’raps?”
“Yes, Jo, please God,” returns the stationer.
“Uncommon precious large, p’raps?” says Jo with eagerness.
“Yes, my poor boy.”
Jo laughs with pleasure. “Wot I wos a-thinking on then, Mr.
Sangsby, wos, that when I wos moved on as fur as ever I could go
and couldn’t he moved no furder, whether you might be so good
p’raps as to write out, wery large so that any one could see it anywheres,
as that I wos wery truly hearty sorry that I done it and that I never
went fur to do it, and that though I didn’t know nothink at all, I
knowd as Mr. Woodcot once cried over it and wos allus grieved over
it, and that I hoped as he’d be able to forgive me in his mind. If the
writin could be made to say it wery large, he might.”
“It shall say it, Jo. Very large.”
Jo laughs again. “Thankee, Mr. Sangsby. It’s wery kind of you, sir,
and it makes me more cumfbler nor I was afore.”
The meek little stationer, with a broken and unfinished cough,
slips down his fourth half-crown—he has never been so close to a
case requiring so many—and is fain to depart. And Jo and he, upon
this little earth, shall meet no more. No more.
For the cart so hard to draw is near its journey’s end and drags over
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stony ground. All round the clock it labours up the broken steps,
shattered and worn. Not many times can the sun rise and behold it
still upon its weary road.
Phil Squod, with his smoky gunpowder visage, at once acts as
nurse and works as armourer at his little table in a corner, often
looking round and saying with a nod of his green-baize cap and an
encouraging elevation of his one eyebrow, “Hold up, my boy! Hold
up!” There, too, is Mr. Jarndyce many a time, and Allan Woodcourt
almost always, both thinking, much, how strangely fate has en-
tangled this rough outcast in the web of very different lives. There,
too, the trooper is a frequent visitor, filling the doorway with his
athletic figure and, from his superfluity of life and strength, seem-
ing to shed down temporary vigour upon Jo, who never fails to
speak more robustly in answer to his cheerful words.
Jo is in a sleep or in a stupor to-day, and Allan Woodcourt, newly
arrived, stands by him, looking down upon his wasted form. After a
while he softly seats himself upon the bedside with his face towards
him—just as he sat in the law-writer’s room—and touches his chest and
heart. The cart had very nearly given up, but labours on a little more.
The trooper stands in the doorway, still and silent. Phil has stopped
in a low clinking noise, with his little hammer in his hand. Mr.
Woodcourt looks round with that grave professional interest and
attention on his face, and glancing significantly at the trooper, signs
to Phil to carry his table out. When the little hammer is next used,
there will be a speck of rust upon it.
“Well, Jo! What is the matter? Don’t be frightened.”
“I thought,” says Jo, who has started and is looking round, “I
thought I was in Tom-all-Alone’s agin. Ain’t there nobody here but
you, Mr. Woodcot?”
“Nobody.”
“And I ain’t took back to Tom-all-Alone’s. Am I, sir?”
“No.” Jo closes his eyes, muttering, “I’m wery thankful.”
After watching him closely a little while, Allan puts his mouth
very near his ear and says to him in a low, distinct voice, “Jo! Did you
ever know a prayer?”
“Never knowd nothink, sir.”
“Not so much as one short prayer?”
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“I’ll say anythink as you say, sir, for I knows it’s good.”
“Our Father.”
“Our Father! Yes, that’s wery good, sir.”
“Which art in heaven.”
“Art in heaven—is the light a-comin, sir?”
“It is close at hand. Hallowed by thy name!”
“Hallowed be—thy—”
The light is come upon the dark benighted way. Dead!
Dead, your Majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen. Dead, right
reverends and wrong reverends of every order. Dead, men and women,
born with heavenly compassion in your hearts. And dying thus around
us every day.
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CHAPTER XLVIII
Closing in
THE PLACE IN LINCOLNSHIRE has shut its many eyes again, and the
house in town is awake. In Lincolnshire the Dedlocks of the past
doze in their picture-frames, and the low wind murmurs through
the long drawing-room as if they were breathing pretty regularly. In
town the Dedlocks of the present rattle in their fire-eyed carriages
through the darkness of the night, and the Dedlock Mercuries, with
ashes (or hair-powder) on their heads, symptomatic of their great
humility, loll away the drowsy mornings in the little windows of the
hall. The fashionable world—tremendous orb, nearly five miles
round—is in full swing, and the solar system works respectfully at its
appointed distances.
Where the throng is thickest, where the lights are brightest, where
all the senses are ministered to with the greatest delicacy and refine-
ment, Lady Dedlock is. From the shining heights she has scaled and
taken, she is never absent. Though the belief she of old reposed in
herself as one able to reserve whatsoever she would under her mantle
of pride is beaten down, though she has no assurance that what she is
to those around her she will remain another day, it is not in her
nature when envious eyes are looking on to yield or to droop. They
say of her that she has lately grown more handsome and more haughty.
The debilitated cousin says of her that she’s beauty nough—tsetup
shopofwomen—but rather larming kind—remindingmanfact—in-
convenient woman—who will getoutofbedandbawthstahlishment—
Shakespeare.
Mr. Tulkinghorn says nothing, looks nothing. Now, as hereto-
fore, he is to be found in doorways of rooms, with his limp white
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child!”
She says it with a kind of scorn—though not of Rosa—and sits
brooding, looking dreamily at her.
“Do you think, Rosa, you are any relief or comfort to me? Do you
suppose your being young and natural, and fond of me and grateful
to me, makes it any pleasure to me to have you near me?”
“I don’t know, my Lady; I can scarcely hope so. But with all my
heart, I wish it was so.”
“It is so, little one.”
The pretty face is checked in its flush of pleasure by the dark ex-
pression on the handsome face before it. It looks timidly for an ex-
planation.
“And if I were to say to-day, ‘Go! Leave me!’ I should say what
would give me great pain and disquiet, child, and what would leave
me very solitary.”
“My Lady! Have I offended you?”
“In nothing. Come here.”
Rosa bends down on the footstool at my Lady’s feet. My Lady,
with that motherly touch of the famous ironmaster night, lays her
hand upon her dark hair and gently keeps it there. “ I
told you, Rosa, that I wished you to be happy and that I would make
you so if I could make anybody happy on this earth. I cannot. There
are reasons now known to me, reasons in which you have no part,
rendering it far better for you that you should not remain here. You
must not remain here. I have determined that you shall not. I have
written to the father of your lover, and he will be here to-day. All this
I have done for your sake.”
The weeping girl covers her hand with kisses and says what shall
she do, what shall she do, when they are separated! Her mistress
kisses her on the cheek and makes no other answer.
“Now, be happy, child, under better circumstances. Be beloved
and happy!”
“Ah, my Lady, I have sometimes thought—forgive my being so
free—that you are not happy.”
“I!”
“Will you be more so when you have sent me away? Pray, pray,
think again. Let me stay a little while!”
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“I have said, my child, that what I do, I do for your sake, not my
own. It is done. What I am towards you, Rosa, is what I am now—
not what I shall be a little while hence. Remember this, and keep my
confidence. Do so much for my sake, and thus all ends between us!”
She detaches herself from her simple-hearted companion and leaves
the room. Late in the afternoon, when she next appears upon the
staircase, she is in her haughtiest and coldest state. As indifferent as if
all passion, feeling, and interest had been worn out in the earlier ages
of the world and had perished from its surface with its other de-
parted monsters.
Mercury has announced Mr. Rouncewell, which is the cause of her
appearance. Mr. Rouncewell is not in the library, but she repairs to
the library. Sir Leicester is there, and she wishes to speak to him first.
“Sir Leicester, I am desirous—but you are engaged.”
Oh, dear no! Not at all. Only Mr. Tulkinghorn.
Always at hand. Haunting every place. No relief or security from
him for a moment.
“I beg your pardon, Lady Dedlock. Will you allow me to retire?”
With a look that plainly says, “You know you have the power to
remain if you will,” she tells him it is not necessary and moves to-
wards a chair. Mr. Tulkinghorn brings it a little forward for her with
his clumsy bow and retires into a window opposite. Interposed be-
tween her and the fading light of day in the now quiet street, his
shadow falls upon her, and he darkens all before her. Even so does he
darken her life.
It is a dull street under the best conditions, where the two long
rows of houses stare at each other with that severity that half-a-dozen
of its greatest mansions seem to have been slowly stared into stone
rather than originally built in that material. It is a street of such dis-
mal grandeur, so determined not to condescend to liveliness, that the
doors and windows hold a gloomy state of their own in black paint
and dust, and the echoing mews behind have a dry and massive ap-
pearance, as if they were reserved to stable the stone chargers of noble
statues. Complicated garnish of iron-work entwines itself over the
flights of steps in this awful street, and from these petrified bowers,
extinguishers for obsolete flambeaux gasp at the upstart gas. Here
and there a weak little iron hoop, through which bold boys aspire to
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throw their friends’ caps (its only present use), retains its place among
the rusty foliage, sacred to the memory of departed oil. Nay, even oil
itself, yet lingering at long intervals in a little absurd glass pot, with a
knob in the bottom like an oyster, blinks and sulks at newer lights
every night, like its high and dry master in the House of Lords.
Therefore there is not much that Lady Dedlock, seated in her chair,
could wish to see through the window in which Mr. Tulkinghorn
stands. And yet—and yet—she sends a look in that direction as if it
were her heart’s desire to have that figure moved out of the way.
Sir Leicester begs his Lady’s pardon. She was about to say?
“Only that Mr. Rouncewell is here (he has called by my appoint-
ment) and that we had better make an end of the question of that
girl. I am tired to death of the matter.”
“What can I do—to—assist?” demands Sir Leicester in some con-
siderable doubt.
“Let us see him here and have done with it. Will you tell them to
send him up?”
“Mr. Tulkinghorn, be so good as to ring. Thank you. Request,”
says Sir Leicester to Mercury, not immediately remembering the
business term, “request the iron gentleman to walk this way.”
Mercury departs in search of the iron gentleman, finds, and pro-
duces him. Sir Leicester receives that ferruginous person graciously.
“I hope you are well, Mr. Rouncewell. Be seated. (My solicitor,
Mr. Tulkinghorn.) My Lady was desirous, Mr. Rouncewell,” Sir Le-
icester skilfully transfers him with a solemn wave of his hand, “was
desirous to speak with you. Hem!”
“I shall be very happy,” returns the iron gentleman, “to give my best
attention to anything Lady Dedlock does me the honour to say.”
As he turns towards her, he finds that the impression she makes
upon him is less agreeable than on the former occasion. A distant
supercilious air makes a cold atmosphere about her, and there is noth-
ing in her bearing, as there was before, to encourage openness.
“Pray, sir,” says Lady Dedlock listlessly, “may I be allowed to in-
quire whether anything has passed between you and your son re-
specting your son’s fancy?”
It is almost too troublesome to her languid eyes to bestow a look
upon him as she asks this question.
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“If my memory serves me, Lady Dedlock, I said, when I had the
pleasure of seeing you before, that I should seriously advise my son
to conquer that—fancy.” The ironmaster repeats her expression with
a little emphasis.
“And did you?”
“Oh! Of course I did.”
Sir Leicester gives a nod, approving and confirmatory. Very
proper. The iron gentleman, having said that he would do it, was
bound to do it. No difference in this respect between the base metals
and the precious. Highly proper.
“And pray has he done so?”
“Really, Lady Dedlock, I cannot make you a definite reply. I fear
not. Probably not yet. In our condition of life, we sometimes couple
an intention with our—our fancies which renders them not alto-
gether easy to throw off. I think it is rather our way to be in earnest.”
Sir Leicester has a misgiving that there may be a hidden Wat Tylerish
meaning in this expression, and fumes a little. Mr. Rouncewell is
perfectly good-humoured and polite, but within such limits, evi-
dently adapts his tone to his reception.
“Because,” proceeds my Lady, “I have been thinking of the sub-
ject, which is tiresome to me.”
“I am very sorry, I am sure.”
“And also of what Sir Leicester said upon it, in which I quite con-
cur”—Sir Leicester flattered—”and if you cannot give us the assur-
ance that this fancy is at an end, I have come to the conclusion that
the girl had better leave me.”
“I can give no such assurance, Lady Dedlock. Nothing of the kind.”
“Then she had better go.”
“Excuse me, my Lady,” Sir Leicester considerately interposes, “but
perhaps this may be doing an injury to the young woman which she
has not merited. Here is a young woman,” says Sir Leicester, mag-
nificently laying out the matter with his right hand like service of
plate, “whose good fortune it is to have attracted the notice and favour
of an eminent lady and to live, under the protection of that eminent
lady, surrounded by the various advantages which such a position
confers, and which are unquestionably very great—I believe unques-
tionably very great, sir—for a young woman in that station of life.
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ner, still deadly pale (and quite an illustration of the debilitated cousin’s
text), whether he is gone out? Yes. Whether Mr. Tulkinghorn is gone
yet? No. Presently she asks again, is he gone yet? No. What is he
doing? Mercury thinks he is writing letters in the library. Would my
Lady wish to see him? Anything but that.
But he wishes to see my Lady. Within a few more minutes he is
reported as sending his respects, and could my Lady please to receive
him for a word or two after her dinner? My Lady will receive him
now. He comes now, apologizing for intruding, even by her permis-
sion, while she is at table. When they are alone, my Lady waves her
hand to dispense with such mockeries.
“What do you want, sir?”
“Why, Lady Dedlock,” says the lawyer, taking a chair at a little
distance from her and slowly rubbing his rusty legs up and down, up
and down, up and down, “I am rather surprised by the course you
have taken.”
“Indeed?”
“Yes, decidedly. I was not prepared for it. I consider it a departure
from our agreement and your promise. It puts us in a new position,
Lady Dedlock. I feel myself under the necessity of saying that I don’t
approve of it.”
He stops in his rubbing and looks at her, with his hands on his
knees. Imperturbable and unchangeable as he is, there is still an inde-
finable freedom in his manner which is new and which does not
escape this woman’s observation.
“I do not quite understand you.”
“Oh, yes you do, I think. I think you do. Come, come, Lady Dedlock,
we must not fence and parry now. You know you like this girl.”
“Well, sir?”
“And you know—and I know—that you have not sent her away
for the reasons you have assigned, but for the purpose of separating
her as much as possible from—excuse my mentioning it as a matter
of business—any reproach and exposure that impend over yourself.”
“Well, sir?”
“Well, Lady Dedlock,” returns the lawyer, crossing his legs and nurs-
ing the uppermost knee. “I object to that. I consider that a dangerous
proceeding. I know it to be unnecessary and calculated to awaken specu-
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She has been looking at the table. She lifts up her eyes and looks at
him. There is a stern expression on her face and a part of her lower lip
is compressed under her teeth. “This woman understands me,” Mr.
Tulkinghorn thinks as she lets her glance fall again. “She cannot be
spared. Why should she spare others?”
For a little while they are silent. Lady Dedlock has eaten no dinner,
but has twice or thrice poured out water with a steady hand and
drunk it. She rises from table, takes a lounging-chair, and reclines in
it, shading her face. There is nothing in her manner to express weak-
ness or excite compassion. It is thoughtful, gloomy, concentrated.
“This woman,” thinks Mr. Tulkinghorn, standing on the hearth, again
a dark object closing up her view, “is a study.”
He studies her at his leisure, not speaking for a time. She too studies
something at her leisure. She is not the first to speak, appearing indeed so
unlikely to be so, though he stood there until midnight, that even he is
driven upon breaking silence.
“Lady Dedlock, the most disagreeable part of this business inter-
view remains, but it is business. Our agreement is broken. A lady of
your sense and strength of character will be prepared for my now
declaring it void and taking my own course.”
“I am quite prepared.”
Mr. Tulkinghorn inclines his head. “That is all I have to trouble
you with, Lady Dedlock.”
She stops him as he is moving out of the room by asking, “This is
the notice I was to receive? I wish not to misapprehend you.”
“Not exactly the notice you were to receive, Lady Dedlock, be-
cause the contemplated notice supposed the agreement to have been
observed. But virtually the same, virtually the same. The difference is
merely in a lawyer’s mind.”
“You intend to give me no other notice?”
“You are right. No.”
“Do you contemplate undeceiving Sir Leicester to-night?”
“A home question!” says Mr. Tulkinghorn with a slight smile and
cautiously shaking his head at the shaded face. “No, not to-night.”
“To-morrow?”
“All things considered, I had better decline answering that
question, Lady Dedlock. If I were to say I don’t know when,
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exactly, you would not believe me, and it would answer no purpose.
It may be to-morrow. I would rather say no more. You are prepared,
and I hold out no expectations which circumstances might fail to
justify. I wish you good evening.”
She removes her hand, turns her pale face towards him as he walks
silently to the door, and stops him once again as he is about to open it.
“Do you intend to remain in the house any time? I heard you were
writing in the library. Are you going to return there?”
“Only for my hat. I am going home.”
She bows her eyes rather than her head, the movement is so slight
and curious, and he withdraws. Clear of the room he looks at his
watch but is inclined to doubt it by a minute or thereabouts. There is
a splendid clock upon the staircase, famous, as splendid clocks not
often are, for its accuracy. “And what do you say,” Mr. Tulkinghorn
inquires, referring to it. “What do you say?”
If it said now, “Don’t go home!” What a famous clock, hereafter,
if it said to-night of all the nights that it has counted off, to this old
man of all the young and old men who have ever stood before it,
“Don’t go home!” With its sharp clear bell it strikes three quarters
after seven and ticks on again. “Why, you are worse than I thought
you,” says Mr. Tulkinghorn, muttering reproof to his watch. “Two
minutes wrong? At this rate you won’t last my time.” What a watch
to return good for evil if it ticked in answer, “Don’t go home!”
He passes out into the streets and walks on, with his hands behind
him, under the shadow of the lofty houses, many of whose mysteries,
difficulties, mortgages, delicate affairs of all kinds, are treasured up within
his old black satin waistcoat. He is in the confidence of the very bricks
and mortar. The high chimney-stacks telegraph family secrets to him.
Yet there is not a voice in a mile of them to whisper, “Don’t go home!”
Through the stir and motion of the commoner streets; through
the roar and jar of many vehicles, many feet, many voices; with the
blazing shop-lights lighting him on, the west wind blowing him on,
and the crowd pressing him on, he is pitilessly urged upon his way,
and nothing meets him murmuring, “Don’t go home!” Arrived at
last in his dull room to light his candles, and look round and up, and
see the Roman pointing from the ceiling, there is no new significance
in the Roman’s hand to-night or in the flutter of the attendant groups
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the ever-heaving sea; not only is it a still night on the deep, and on
the shore where the watcher stands to see the ship with her spread
wings cross the path of light that appears to be presented to only
him; but even on this stranger’s wilderness of London there is some
rest. Its steeples and towers and its one great dome grow more ethe-
real; its smoky house-tops lose their grossness in the pale effulgence;
the noises that arise from the streets are fewer and are softened, and
the footsteps on the pavements pass more tranquilly away. In these
fields of Mr. Tulkinghorn’s inhabiting, where the shepherds play on
Chancery pipes that have no stop, and keep their sheep in the fold by
hook and by crook until they have shorn them exceeding close, every
noise is merged, this moonlight night, into a distant ringing hum, as
if the city were a vast glass, vibrating.
What’s that? Who fired a gun or pistol? Where was it?
The few foot-passengers start, stop, and stare about them. Some
windows and doors are opened, and people come out to look. It was
a loud report and echoed and rattled heavily. It shook one house, or
so a man says who was passing. It has aroused all the dogs in the
neighbourhood, who bark vehemently. Terrified cats scamper across
the road. While the dogs are yet barking and howling—there is one
dog howling like a demon—the church-clocks, as if they were startled
too, begin to strike. The hum from the streets, likewise, seems to
swell into a shout. But it is soon over. Before the last clock begins to
strike ten, there is a lull. When it has ceased, the fine night, the bright
large moon, and multitudes of stars, are left at peace again.
Has Mr. Tulkinghorn been disturbed? His windows are dark and
quiet, and his door is shut. It must be something unusual indeed to
bring him out of his shell. Nothing is heard of him, nothing is seen
of him. What power of cannon might it take to shake that rusty old
man out of his immovable composure?
For many years the persistent Roman has been pointing, with no
particular meaning, from that ceiling. It is not likely that he has any
new meaning in him to-night. Once pointing, always pointing—
like any Roman, or even Briton, with a single idea. There he is, no
doubt, in his impossible attitude, pointing, unavailingly, all night
long. Moonlight, darkness, dawn, sunrise, day. There he is still, ea-
gerly pointing, and no one minds him.
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But a little after the coming of the day come people to clean the
rooms. And either the Roman has some new meaning in him, not
expressed before, or the foremost of them goes wild, for looking up
at his outstretched hand and looking down at what is below it, that
person shrieks and flies. The others, looking in as the first one looked,
shriek and fly too, and there is an alarm in the street.
What does it mean? No light is admitted into the darkened cham-
ber, and people unaccustomed to it enter, and treading softly but
heavily, carry a weight into the bedroom and lay it down. There is
whispering and wondering all day, strict search of every corner, care-
ful tracing of steps, and careful noting of the disposition of every
article of furniture. All eyes look up at the Roman, and all voices
murmur, “If he could only tell what he saw!”
He is pointing at a table with a bottle (nearly full of wine) and a
glass upon it and two candles that were blown out suddenly soon
after being lighted. He is pointing at an empty chair and at a stain
upon the ground before it that might be almost covered with a hand.
These objects lie directly within his range. An excited imagination
might suppose that there was something in them so terrific as to
drive the rest of the composition, not only the attendant big-legged
boys, but the clouds and flowers and pillars too—in short, the very
body and soul of Allegory, and all the brains it has—stark mad. It
happens surely that every one who comes into the darkened room
and looks at these things looks up at the Roman and that he is in-
vested in all eyes with mystery and awe, as if he were a paralysed
dumb witness.
So it shall happen surely, through many years to come, that ghostly
stories shall be told of the stain upon the floor, so easy to be covered,
so hard to be got out, and that the Roman, pointing from the ceiling
shall point, so long as dust and damp and spiders spare him, with far
greater significance than he ever had in Mr. Tulkinghorn’s time, and
with a deadly meaning. For Mr. Tulkinghorn’s time is over for ever-
more, and the Roman pointed at the murderous hand uplifted against
his life, and pointed helplessly at him, from night to morning, lying
face downward on the floor, shot through the heart.
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CHAPTER XLIX
Dutiful Friendship
A GREAT ANNUAL OCCASION has come round in the establishment of Mr.
Matthew Bagnet, otherwise Lignum Vitae, ex-artilleryman and present
bassoon-player. An occasion of feasting and festival. The celebration of a
birthday in the family.
It is not Mr. Bagnet’s birthday. Mr. Bagnet merely distinguishes
that epoch in the musical instrument business by kissing the children
with an extra smack before breakfast, smoking an additional pipe
after dinner, and wondering towards evening what his poor old
mother is thinking about it—a subject of infinite speculation, and
rendered so by his mother having departed this life twenty years.
Some men rarely revert to their father, but seem, in the bank-books
of their remembrance, to have transferred all the stock of filial affec-
tion into their mother’s name. Mr. Bagnet is one of like his trade the
better for that. If I had kept clear of his old girl causes him usually to
make the noun-substantive “goodness” of the feminine gender.
It is not the birthday of one of the three children. Those
occasions are kept with some marks of distinction, but they rarely
overleap the bounds of happy returns and a pudding. On young
Woolwich’s last birthday, Mr. Bagnet certainly did, after observing
on his growth and general advancement, proceed, in a moment of
profound reflection on the changes wrought by time, to examine
him in the catechism, accomplishing with extreme accuracy the ques-
tions number one and two, “What is your name?” and “Who gave
you that name?” but there failing in the exact precision of his memory
and substituting for number three the question “And how do you
like that name?” which he propounded with a sense of its impor-
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selves is almost too moving a spectacle for Mrs. Bagnet to look upon
with the calmness proper to her position. At last the various cleans-
ing processes are triumphantly completed; Quebec and Malta appear
in fresh attire, smiling and dry; pipes, tobacco, and something to
drink are placed upon the table; and the old girl enjoys the first peace
of mind she ever knows on the day of this delightful entertainment.
When Mr. Bagnet takes his usual seat, the hands of the clock are
very near to half-past four; as they mark it accurately, Mr. Bagnet
announces, “George! Military time.”
It is George, and he has hearty congratulations for the old girl
(whom he kisses on the great occasion), and for the children, and for
Mr. Bagnet. “Happy returns to all!” says Mr. George.
“But, George, old man!” cries Mrs. Bagnet, looking at him
curiously. “What’s come to you?”
“Come to me?”
“Ah! You are so white, George—for you—and look so shocked.
Now don’t he, Lignum?”
“George,” says Mr. Bagnet, “tell the old girl. What’s the matter.”
“I didn’t know I looked white,” says the trooper, passing his hand
over his brow, “and I didn’t know I looked shocked, and I’m sorry I
do. But the truth is, that boy who was taken in at my place died
yesterday afternoon, and it has rather knocked me over.”
“Poor creetur!” says Mrs. Bagnet with a mother’s pity. “Is he gone?
Dear, dear!”
“I didn’t mean to say anything about it, for it’s not birthday talk,
but you have got it out of me, you see, before I sit down. I should
have roused up in a minute,” says the trooper, making himself speak
more gaily, “but you’re so quick, Mrs. Bagnet.”
“You’re right. The old girl,” says Mr. Bagnet. “Is as quick. As powder.”
“And what’s more, she’s the subject of the day, and we’ll stick to
her,” cries Mr. George. “See here, I have brought a little brooch along
with me. It’s a poor thing, you know, but it’s a keepsake. That’s all
the good it is, Mrs. Bagnet.”
Mr. George produces his present, which is greeted with admiring
leapings and clappings by the young family, and with a species of
reverential admiration by Mr. Bagnet. “Old girl,” says Mr. Bagnet.
“Tell him my opinion of it.”
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“Then,” says the trooper, not yet lighting his pipe, and passing his
heavy hand over his hair, “that brought up Gridley in a man’s mind.
His was a bad case too, in a different way. Then the two got mixed
up in a man’s mind with a flinty old rascal who had to do with both.
And to think of that rusty carbine, stock and barrel, standing up on
end in his corner, hard, indifferent, taking everything so evenly—it
made flesh and blood tingle, I do assure you.”
“My advice to you,” returns Mrs. Bagnet, “is to light your pipe
and tingle that way. It’s wholesomer and comfortabler, and better for
the health altogether.”
“You’re right,” says the trooper, “and I’ll do it.”
So he does it, though still with an indignant gravity that impresses
the young Bagnets, and even causes Mr. Bagnet to defer the cer-
emony of drinking Mrs. Bagnet’s health, always given by himself on
these occasions in a speech of exemplary terseness. But the young
ladies having composed what Mr. Bagnet is in the habit of calling
“the mixtur,” and George’s pipe being now in a glow, Mr. Bagnet
considers it his duty to proceed to the toast of the evening. He ad-
dresses the assembled company in the following terms.
“George. Woolwich. Quebec. Malta. This is her birthday. Take a
day’s march. And you won’t find such another. Here’s towards her!”
The toast having been drunk with enthusiasm, Mrs. Bagnet returns
thanks in a neat address of corresponding brevity. This model compo-
sition is limited to the three words “And wishing yours!” which the old
girl follows up with a nod at everybody in succession and a well-regu-
lated swig of the mixture. This she again follows up, on the present
occasion, by the wholly unexpected exclamation, “Here’s a man!”
Here is a man, much to the astonishment of the little company,
looking in at the parlour-door. He is a sharp-eyed man—a quick
keen man—and he takes in everybody’s look at him, all at once,
individually and collectively, in a manner that stamps him a remark-
able man.
“George,” says the man, nodding, “how do you find yourself?”
“Why, it’s Bucket!” cries Mr. George.
“Yes,” says the man, coming in and closing the door. “I was going
down the street here when I happened to stop and look in at the mu-
sical instruments in the shop-window—a friend of mine is in want of
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minds, eh? Not they, but they’ll be upon the minds of some of the
young fellows, some of these days, and make ‘em precious low-spir-
ited. I ain’t much of a prophet, but I can tell you that, ma’am.”
Mrs. Bagnet, quite charmed, hopes Mr. Bucket has a family of his
own.
“There, ma’am!” says Mr. Bucket. “Would you believe it? No, I
haven’t. My wife and a lodger constitute my family. Mrs. Bucket is
as fond of children as myself and as wishful to have ‘em, but no. So
it is. Worldly goods are divided unequally, and man must not repine.
What a very nice backyard, ma’am! Any way out of that yard, now?”
There is no way out of that yard.
“Ain’t there really?” says Mr. Bucket. “I should have thought
there might have been. Well, I don’t know as I ever saw a backyard
that took my fancy more. Would you allow me to look at it? Thank
you. No, I see there’s no way out. But what a very good-propor-
tioned yard it is!”
Having cast his sharp eye all about it, Mr. Bucket returns to his
chair next his friend Mr. George and pats Mr. George affectionately
on the shoulder.
“How are your spirits now, George?”
“All right now,” returns the trooper.
“That’s your sort!” says Mr. Bucket. “Why should you ever have
been otherwise? A man of your fine figure and constitution has no
right to be out of spirits. That ain’t a chest to be out of spirits, is it,
ma’am? And you haven’t got anything on your mind, you know,
George; what could you have on your mind!”
Somewhat harping on this phrase, considering the extent and vari-
ety of his conversational powers, Mr. Bucket twice or thrice repeats
it to the pipe he lights, and with a listening face that is particularly his
own. But the sun of his sociality soon recovers from this brief eclipse
and shines again.
“And this is brother, is it, my dears?” says Mr. Bucket, referring
to Quebec and Malta for information on the subject of young
Woolwich. “And a nice brother he is—half-brother I mean to say.
For he’s too old to be your boy, ma’am.”
“I can certify at all events that he is not anybody else’s,”
returns Mrs. Bagnet, laughing.
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“Well, you do surprise me! Yet he’s like you, there’s no denying.
Lord, he’s wonderfully like you! But about what you may call the
brow, you know, there his father comes out!” Mr. Bucket compares
the faces with one eye shut up, while Mr. Bagnet smokes in stolid
satisfaction.
This is an opportunity for Mrs. Bagnet to inform him that the
boy is George’s godson.
“George’s godson, is he?” rejoins Mr. Bucket with extreme
cordiality. “I must shake hands over again with George’s godson.
Godfather and godson do credit to one another. And what do you
intend to make of him, ma’am? Does he show any turn for any
musical instrument?”
Mr. Bagnet suddenly interposes, “Plays the fife. Beautiful.”
“Would you believe it, governor,” says Mr. Bucket, struck by the
coincidence, “that when I was a boy I played the fife myself? Not in
a scientific way, as I expect he does, but by ear. Lord bless you! ‘Brit-
ish Grenadiers’—there’s a tune to warm an Englishman up! could
you give us ‘British Grenadiers,’ my fine fellow?”
Nothing could be more acceptable to the little circle than this call
upon young Woolwich, who immediately fetches his fife and per-
forms the stirring melody, during which performance Mr. Bucket,
much enlivened, beats time and never falls to come in sharp with the
burden, “British Gra-a-anadeers!” In short, he shows so much musi-
cal taste that Mr. Bagnet actually takes his pipe from his lips to ex-
press his conviction that he is a singer. Mr. Bucket receives the har-
monious impeachment so modestly, confessing how that he did once
chaunt a little, for the expression of the feelings of his own bosom,
and with no presumptuous idea of entertaining his friends, that he is
asked to sing. Not to be behindhand in the sociality of the evening,
he complies and gives them “Believe Me, if All Those Endearing
Young Charms.” This ballad, he informs Mrs. Bagnet, he considers
to have been his most powerful ally in moving the heart of Mrs.
Bucket when a maiden, and inducing her to approach the altar—Mr.
Bucket’s own words are “to come up to the scratch.”
This sparkling stranger is such a new and agreeable feature in the
evening that Mr. George, who testified no great emotions of plea-
sure on his entrance, begins, in spite of himself, to be rather proud of
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CHAPTER L
Esther’s Narrative
IT HAPPENED THAT WHEN I came home from Deal I found a note
from Caddy Jellyby (as we always continued to call her), informing
me that her health, which had been for some time very delicate, was
worse and that she would be more glad than she could tell me if I
would go to see her. It was a note of a few lines, written from the
couch on which she lay and enclosed to me in another from her
husband, in which he seconded her entreaty with much solicitude.
Caddy was now the mother, and I the godmother, of such a poor
little baby—such a tiny old-faced mite, with a countenance that seemed
to be scarcely anything but cap-border, and a little lean, long-fin-
gered hand, always clenched under its chin. It would lie in this atti-
tude all day, with its bright specks of eyes open, wondering (as I used
to imagine) how it came to be so small and weak. Whenever it was
moved it cried, but at all other times it was so patient that the sole
desire of its life appeared to be to lie quiet and think. It had curious
little dark veins in its face and curious little dark marks under its eyes
like faint remembrances of poor Caddy’s inky days, and altogether,
to those who were not used to it, it was quite a piteous little sight.
But it was enough for Caddy that she was used to it. The projects
with which she beguiled her illness, for little Esther’s education, and
little Esther’s marriage, and even for her own old age as the grand-
mother of little Esther’s little Esthers, was so prettily expressive of
devotion to this pride of her life that I should be tempted to recall
some of them but for the timely remembrance that I am getting on
irregularly as it is.
To return to the letter. Caddy had a superstition about me which
had been strengthening in her mind ever since that night long ago
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when she had lain asleep with her head in my lap. She almost—I
think I must say quite—believed that I did her good whenever I was
near her. Now although this was such a fancy of the affectionate girl’s
that I am almost ashamed to mention it, still it might have all the
force of a fact when she was really ill. Therefore I set off to Caddy,
with my guardian’s consent, post-haste; and she and Prince made so
much of me that there never was anything like it.
Next day I went again to sit with her, and next day I went again. It
was a very easy journey, for I had only to rise a little earlier in the
morning, and keep my accounts, and attend to housekeeping mat-
ters before leaving home.
But when I had made these three visits, my guardian said to me,
on my return at night, “Now, little woman, little woman, this will
never do. Constant dropping will wear away a stone, and constant
coaching will wear out a Dame Durden. We will go to London for a
while and take possession of our old lodgings.”
“Not for me, dear guardian,” said I, “for I never feel tired,” which
was strictly true. I was only too happy to be in such request.
“For me then,” returned my guardian, “or for Ada, or for both of
us. It is somebody’s birthday to-morrow, I think.”
“Truly I think it is,” said I, kissing my darling, who would be
twenty-one to-morrow.
“Well,” observed my guardian, half pleasantly, half seriously, “that’s
a great occasion and will give my fair cousin some necessary business
to transact in assertion of her independence, and will make London a
more convenient place for all of us. So to London we will go. That
being settled, there is another thing—how have you left Caddy?”
“Very unwell, guardian. I fear it will be some time before she re-
gains her health and strength.”
“What do you call some time, now?” asked my guardian thought-
fully.
“Some weeks, I am afraid.”
“Ah!” He began to walk about the room with his hands in his
pockets, showing that he had been thinking as much. “Now, what
do you say about her doctor? Is he a good doctor, my love?”
I felt obliged to confess that I knew nothing to the contrary but
that Prince and I had agreed only that evening that we would like his
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And still there was the same shade between me and my darling.
“So, Dame Trot,” observed my guardian, shutting up his book
one night when we were all three together, “so Woodcourt has re-
stored Caddy Jellyby to the full enjoyment of life again?”
“Yes,” I said; “and to be repaid by such gratitude as hers is to be
made rich, guardian.”
“I wish it was,” he returned, “with all my heart.”
So did I too, for that matter. I said so.
“Aye! We would make him as rich as a Jew if we knew how. Would
we not, little woman?”
I laughed as I worked and replied that I was not sure about that,
for it might spoil him, and he might not be so useful, and there
might be many who could ill spare him. As Miss Flite, and Caddy
herself, and many others.
“True,” said my guardian. “I had forgotten that. But we would
agree to make him rich enough to live, I suppose? Rich enough to
work with tolerable peace of mind? Rich enough to have his own
happy home and his own household gods—and household goddess,
too, perhaps?”
That was quite another thing, I said. We must all agree in that.
“To be sure,” said my guardian. “All of us. I have a great regard for
Woodcourt, a high esteem for him; and I have been sounding him
delicately about his plans. It is difficult to offer aid to an independent
man with that just kind of pride which he possesses. And yet I would
be glad to do it if I might or if I knew how. He seems half inclined for
another voyage. But that appears like casting such a man away.”
“It might open a new world to him,” said I.
‘’So it might, little woman,” my guardian assented. ‘’I doubt if he
expects much of the old world. Do you know I have fancied that he
sometimes feels some particular disappointment or misfortune en-
countered in it. You never heard of anything of that sort?”
I shook my head.
“Humph,” said my guardian. “I am mistaken, I dare say.” As there
was a little pause here, which I thought, for my dear girl’s satisfac-
tion, had better be filled up, I hummed an air as I worked which was
a favourite with my guardian.
“And do you think Mr. Woodcourt will make another voyage?” I
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CHAPTER LI
Enlightened
WHEN MR. WOODCOURT ARRIVED in London, he went, that very
same day, to Mr. Vholes’s in Symond’s Inn. For he never once, from
the moment when I entreated him to be a friend to Richard, ne-
glected or forgot his promise. He had told me that he accepted the
charge as a sacred trust, and he was ever true to it in that spirit.
He found Mr. Vholes in his office and informed Mr. Vholes of
his agreement with Richard that he should call there to learn his
address.
“Just so, sir,” said Mr. Vholes. “Mr. C.’s address is not a hundred
miles from here, sir, Mr. C.’s address is not a hundred miles from
here. Would you take a seat, sir?”
Mr. Woodcourt thanked Mr. Vholes, but he had no business with
him beyond what he had mentioned.
“Just so, sir. I believe, sir,” said Mr. Vholes, still quietly insisting
on the seat by not giving the address, “that you have influence with
Mr. C. Indeed I am aware that you have.”
“I was not aware of it myself,” returned Mr. Woodcourt; “but I
suppose you know best.”
“Sir,” rejoined Mr. Vholes, self-contained as usual, voice and all,
“it is a part of my professional duty to know best. It is a part of my
professional duty to study and to understand a gentleman who con-
fides his interests to me. In my professional duty I shall not be want-
ing, sir, if I know it. I may, with the best intentions, be wanting in it
without knowing it; but not if I know it, sir.”
Mr. Woodcourt again mentioned the address.
“Give me leave, sir,” said Mr. Vholes. “Bear with me for a mo-
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ment. Sir, Mr. C. is playing for a considerable stake, and cannot play
without—need I say what?”
“Money, I presume?”
“Sir,” said Mr. Vholes, “to be honest with you (honesty being my
golden rule, whether I gain by it or lose, and I find that I generally
lose), money is the word. Now, sir, upon the chances of Mr. C.’s game
I express to you no opinion, no opinion. It might be highly impolitic
in Mr. C., after playing so long and so high, to leave off; it might be
the reverse; I say nothing. No, sir,” said Mr. Vholes, bringing his hand
flat down upon his desk in a positive manner, “nothing.”
“You seem to forget,” returned Mr, Woodcourt, “that I ask you to
say nothing and have no interest in anything you say.”
“Pardon me, sir!” retorted Mr. Vholes. “You do yourself an injus-
tice. No, sir! Pardon me! You shall not—shall not in my office, if I
know it—do yourself an injustice. You are interested in anything,
and in everything, that relates to your friend. I know human nature
much better, sir, than to admit for an instant that a gentleman of
your appearance is not interested in whatever concerns his friend.”
“Well,” replied Mr. Woodcourt, “that may be. I am particularly
interested in his address.”
“The number, sir,” said Mr. Vholes parenthetically, “I believe I
have already mentioned. If Mr. C. is to continue to play for this
considerable stake, sir, he must have funds. Understand me! There
are funds in hand at present. I ask for nothing; there are funds in
hand. But for the onward play, more funds must be provided, unless
Mr. C. is to throw away what he has already ventured, which is wholly
and solely a point for his consideration. This, sir, I take the opportu-
nity of stating openly to you as the friend of Mr. C. Without funds
I shall always be happy to appear and act for Mr. C. to the extent of
all such costs as are safe to be allowed out of the estate, not beyond
that. I could not go beyond that, sir, without wronging some one. I
must either wrong my three dear girls or my venerable father, who is
entirely dependent on me, in the Vale of Taunton; or some one.
Whereas, sir, my resolution is (call it weakness or folly if you please)
to wrong no one.”
Mr. Woodcourt rather sternly rejoined that he was glad to hear it.
“I wish, sir,” said Mr. Vholes, “to leave a good name behind me.
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been capable of nothing else. It may be that I should have done bet-
ter by keeping out of the net into which my destiny has worked me,
but I think not, though I dare say you will soon hear, if you have not
already heard, a very different opinion. To make short of
a long story, I am afraid I have wanted an object; but I have an object
now—or it has me—and it is too late to discuss it. Take me as I am,
and make the best of me.”
“A bargain,” said Mr. Woodcourt. “Do as much by me in return.”
“Oh! You,” returned Richard, “you can pursue your art for its own
sake, and can put your hand upon the plough and never turn, and
can strike a purpose out of anything. You and I are very different
creatures.”
He spoke regretfully and lapsed for a moment into his weary con-
dition.
“Well, well!” he cried, shaking it off. “Everything has an end. We
shall see! So you will take me as I am, and make the best of me?”
“Aye! Indeed I will.” They shook hands upon it laughingly, but in
deep earnestness. I can answer for one of them with my heart of hearts.
“You come as a godsend,” said Richard, “for I have seen nobody
here yet but Vholes. Woodcourt, there is one subject I should like to
mention, for once and for all, in the beginning of our treaty. You can
hardly make the best of me if I don’t. You know, I dare say, that I
have an attachment to my cousin Ada?”
Mr. Woodcourt replied that I had hinted as much to him. “Now
pray,” returned Richard, “don’t think me a heap of selfishness. Don’t
suppose that I am splitting my head and half breaking my heart over
this miserable Chancery suit for my own rights and interests alone.
Ada’s are bound up with mine; they can’t be separated; Vholes works
for both of us. Do think of that!”
He was so very solicitous on this head that Mr. Woodcourt gave him
the strongest assurances that he did him no injustice.
“You see,” said Richard, with something pathetic in his manner of
lingering on the point, though it was off-hand and unstudied, “to an
upright fellow like you, bringing a friendly face like yours here, I
cannot bear the thought of appearing selfish and mean. I want to see
Ada righted, Woodcourt, as well as myself; I want to do my utmost
to right her, as well as myself; I venture what I can scrape together to
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We had next to find out the number. “Or Mr. Vholes’s office will
do,” I recollected, “for Mr. Vholes’s office is next door.” Upon which
Ada said, perhaps that was Mr. Vholes’s office in the corner there.
And it really was.
Then came the question, which of the two next doors? I was go-
ing for the one, and my darling was going for the other; and my
darling was right again. So up we went to the second story, when we
came to Richard’s name in great white letters on a hearse-like panel.
I should have knocked, but Ada said perhaps we had better turn
the handle and go in. Thus we came to Richard, poring over a table
covered with dusty bundles of papers which seemed to me like dusty
mirrors reflecting his own mind. Wherever I looked I saw the omi-
nous words that ran in it repeated. Jarndyce and Jarndyce.
He received us very affectionately, and we sat down. “If you had
come a little earlier,” he said, “you would have found Woodcourt
here. There never was such a good fellow as Woodcourt is. He finds
time to look in between-whiles, when anybody else with half his
work to do would be thinking about not being able to come. And he
is so cheery, so fresh, so sensible, so earnest, so—everything that I am
not, that the place brightens whenever he comes, and darkens when-
ever he goes again.”
“God bless him,” I thought, “for his truth to me!”
“He is not so sanguine, Ada,” continued Richard, casting his de-
jected look over the bundles of papers, “as Vholes and I are usually,
but he is only an outsider and is not in the mysteries. We have gone
into them, and he has not. He can’t be expected to know much of
such a labyrinth.”
As his look wandered over the papers again and he passed his two
hands over his head, I noticed how sunken and how large his eyes
appeared, how dry his lips were, and how his finger-nails were all
bitten away.
“Is this a healthy place to live in, Richard, do you think?” said I.
“Why, my dear Minerva,” answered Richard with his old gay laugh,
“it is neither a rural nor a cheerful place; and when the sun shines
here, you may lay a pretty heavy wager that it is shining brightly in an
open spot. But it’s well enough for the time. It’s near the offices and
near Vholes.”
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lingered for one more look of the precious face which it seemed to
rive my heart to turn from.
So I said (in a merry, bustling manner) that unless they gave me
some encouragement to come back, I was not sure that I could take
that liberty, upon which my dear girl looked up, faintly smiling
through her tears, and I folded her lovely face between my hands,
and gave it one last kiss, and laughed, and ran away.
And when I got downstairs, oh, how I cried! It almost seemed to
me that I had lost my Ada for ever. I was so lonely and so blank
without her, and it was so desolate to be going home with no hope
of seeing her there, that I could get no comfort for a little while as I
walked up and down in a dim corner sobbing and crying.
I came to myself by and by, after a little scolding, and took a coach
home. The poor boy whom I had found at St. Albans had reap-
peared a short time before and was lying at the point of death; in-
deed, was then dead, though I did not know it. My guardian had
gone out to inquire about him and did not return to dinner. Being
quite alone, I cried a little again, though on the whole I don’t think I
behaved so very, very ill.
It was only natural that I should not be quite accustomed to the loss
of my darling yet. Three or four hours were not a long time after years.
But my mind dwelt so much upon the uncongenial scene in which I had
left her, and I pictured it as such an overshadowed stony-hearted one,
and I so longed to be near her and taking some sort of care of her, that I
determined to go back in the evening only to look up at her windows.
It was foolish, I dare say, but it did not then seem at all so to me, and
it does not seem quite so even now. I took Charley into my confi-
dence, and we went out at dusk. It was dark when we came to the new
strange home of my dear girl, and there was a light behind the yellow
blinds. We walked past cautiously three or four times, looking up, and
narrowly missed encountering Mr. Vholes, who came out of his office
while we were there and turned his head to look up too before going
home. The sight of his lank black figure and the lonesome air of that
nook in the dark were favourable to the state of my mind. I thought of
the youth and love and beauty of my dear girl, shut up in such an ill-
assorted refuge, almost as if it were a cruel place.
It was very solitary and very dull, and I did not doubt that I might
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safely steal upstairs. I left Charley below and went up with a light
foot, not distressed by any glare from the feeble oil lanterns on the
way. I listened for a few moments, and in the musty rotting silence
of the house believed that I could hear the murmur of their young
voices. I put my lips to the hearse-like panel of the door as a kiss for
my dear and came quietly down again, thinking that one of these
days I would confess to the visit.
And it really did me good, for though nobody but Charley and I
knew anything about it, I somehow felt as if it had diminished the
separation between Ada and me and had brought us together again
for those moments. I went back, not quite accustomed yet to the
change, but all the better for that hovering about my darling.
My guardian had come home and was standing thoughtfully by
the dark window. When I went in, his face cleared and he came to his
seat, but he caught the light upon my face as I took mine.
“Little woman,” said he, “You have been crying.”
“Why, yes, guardian,” said I, “I am afraid I have been, a little. Ada
has been in such distress, and is so very sorry, guardian.”
I put my arm on the back of his chair, and I saw in his glance that
my words and my look at her empty place had prepared him.
“Is she married, my dear?”
I told him all about it and how her first entreaties had referred to
his forgiveness.
“She has no need of it,” said he. “Heaven bless her and her hus-
band!” But just as my first impulse had been to pity her, so was his.
“Poor girl, poor girl! Poor Rick! Poor Ada!”
Neither of us spoke after that, until he said with a sigh, “Well,
well, my dear! Bleak House is thinning fast.”
“But its mistress remains, guardian.” Though I was timid about
saying it, I ventured because of the sorrowful tone in which he had
spoken. “She will do all she can to make it happy,” said I.
“She will succeed, my love!”
The letter had made no difference between us except that the seat
by his side had come to be mine; it made none now. He turned his
old bright fatherly look upon me, laid his hand on my hand in his
old way, and said again, “She will succeed, my dear. Nevertheless,
Bleak House is thinning fast, O little woman!”
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I was sorry presently that this was all we said about that. I was
rather disappointed. I feared I might not quite have been all I had
meant to be since the letter and the answer.
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CHAPTER LII
Obstinacy
BUT ONE OTHER DAY HAD INTERVENED when, early in the morning as
we were going to breakfast, Mr. Woodcourt came in haste with the
astounding news that a terrible murder had been committed for which
Mr. George had been apprehended and was in custody. When he
told us that a large reward was offered by Sir Leicester Dedlock for
the murderer’s apprehension, I did not in my first consternation un-
derstand why; but a few more words explained to me that the mur-
dered person was Sir Leicester’s lawyer, and immediately my mother’s
dread of him rushed into my remembrance.
This unforeseen and violent removal of one whom she had long
watched and distrusted and who had long watched and distrusted
her, one for whom she could have had few intervals of kindness,
always dreading in him a dangerous and secret enemy, appeared so
awful that my first thoughts were of her. How appalling to hear of
such a death and be able to feel no pity! How dreadful to remember,
perhaps, that she had sometimes even wished the old man away who
was so swiftly hurried out of life!
Such crowding reflections, increasing the distress and fear I always
felt when the name was mentioned, made me so agitated that I could
scarcely hold my place at the table. I was quite unable to follow the
conversation until I had had a little time to recover. But when I came
to myself and saw how shocked my guardian was and found that
they were earnestly speaking of the suspected man and recalling every
favourable impression we had formed of him out of the good we
had known of him, my interest and my fears were so strongly aroused
in his behalf that I was quite set up again.
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Mr. Bagnet made us a stiff military bow, and Mrs. Bagnet dropped
us a curtsy.
“Real good friends of mine, they are,” sald Mr. George. “It was at
their house I was taken.”
“With a second-hand wiolinceller,” Mr. Bagnet put in, twitching
his head angrily. “Of a good tone. For a friend. That money was no
object to.”
“Mat,” said Mr. George, “you have heard pretty well all I have
been saying to this lady and these two gentlemen. I know it meets
your approval?”
Mr. Bagnet, after considering, referred the point to his wife. “Old
girl,” said he. “Tell him. Whether or not. It meets my approval.”
“Why, George,” exclaimed Mrs. Bagnet, who had been unpacking
her basket, in which there was a piece of cold pickled pork, a little tea
and sugar, and a brown loaf, “you ought to know it don’t. You ought
to know it’s enough to drive a person wild to hear you. You won’t be
got off this way, and you won’t be got off that way—what do you
mean by such picking and choosing? It’s stuff and nonsense, George.”
“Don’t be severe upon me in my misfortunes, Mrs. Bagnet,” said
the trooper lightly.
“Oh! Bother your misfortunes,” cried Mrs. Bagnet, “if they don’t
make you more reasonable than that comes to. I never was so ashamed
in my life to hear a man talk folly as I have been to hear you talk this
day to the present company. Lawyers? Why, what but too many
cooks should hinder you from having a dozen lawyers if the gentle-
man recommended them to you?”
“This is a very sensible woman,” said my guardian. “I hope you
will persuade him, Mrs. Bagnet.”
“Persuade him, sir?” she returned. “Lord bless you, no. You don’t
know George. Now, there!” Mrs. Bagnet left her basket to point
him out with both her bare brown hands. “There he stands! As self-
willed and as determined a man, in the wrong way, as ever put a
human creature under heaven out of patience! You could as soon take
up and shoulder an eight and forty pounder by your own strength as
turn that man when he has got a thing into his head and fixed it
there. Why, don’t I know him!” cried Mrs. Bagnet. “Don’t I know
you, George! You don’t mean to set up for a new character with me
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move George on this point unless you had got a new power to move
him with. And I have got it!”
“You are a jewel of a woman,” said my guardian. “Go on!”
“Now, I tell you, miss,” she proceeded, clapping her hands in her
hurry and agitation a dozen times in every sentence, “that what he says
concerning no relations is all bosh. They don’t know of him, but he does
know of them. He has said more to me at odd times than to anybody
else, and it warn’t for nothing that he once spoke to my Woolwich about
whitening and wrinkling mothers’ heads. For fifty pounds he had seen
his mother that day. She’s alive and must be brought here straight!”
Instantly Mrs. Bagnet put some pins into her mouth and began
pinning up her skirts all round a little higher than the level of her
grey cloak, which she accomplished with surpassing dispatch and
dexterity.
“Lignum,” said Mrs. Bagnet, “you take care of the children, old
man, and give me the umbrella! I’m away to Lincolnshire to bring
that old lady here.”
“But, bless the woman,” cried my guardian with his hand in his
pocket, “how is she going? What money has she got?”
Mrs. Bagnet made another application to her skirts and brought
forth a leathern purse in which she hastily counted over a few shil-
lings and which she then shut up with perfect satisfaction.
“Never you mind for me, miss. I’m a soldier’s wife and accus-
tomed to travel my own way. Lignum, old boy,” kissing him, “one
for yourself, three for the children. Now I’m away into Lincolnshire
after George’s mother!”
And she actually set off while we three stood looking at one an-
other lost in amazement. She actually trudged away in her grey cloak
at a sturdy pace, and turned the corner, and was gone.
“Mr. Bagnet,” said my guardian. “Do you mean to let her go in
that way?”
“Can’t help it,” he returned. “Made her way home once from an-
other quarter of the world. With the same grey cloak. And same
umbrella. Whatever the old girl says, do. Do it! Whenever the old
girl says, I’ll do it. She does it.”
“Then she is as honest and genuine as she looks,” rejoined my
guardian, “and it is impossible to say more for her.”
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CHAPTER LIII
The Track
MR. BUCKET AND HIS FAT FOREFINGER are much in consultation to-
gether under existing circumstances. When Mr. Bucket has a matter
of this pressing interest under his consideration, the fat forefinger
seems to rise, to the dignity of a familiar demon. He puts it to his
ears, and it whispers information; he puts it to his lips, and it enjoins
him to secrecy; he rubs it over his nose, and it sharpens his scent; he
shakes it before a guilty man, and it charms him to his destruction.
The Augurs of the Detective Temple invariably predict that when
Mr. Bucket and that finger are in much conference, a terrible avenger
will be heard of before long.
Otherwise mildly studious in his observation of human nature,
on the whole a benignant philosopher not disposed to be severe upon
the follies of mankind, Mr. Bucket pervades a vast number of houses
and strolls about an infinity of streets, to outward appearance rather
languishing for want of an object. He is in the friendliest condition
towards his species and will drink with most of them. He is free with
his money, affable in his manners, innocent in his conversation—but
through the placid stream of his life there glides an under-current of
forefinger.
Time and place cannot bind Mr. Bucket. Like man in the abstract,
he is here to-day and gone to-morrow—but, very unlike man in-
deed, he is here again the next day. This evening he will be casually
looking into the iron extinguishers at the door of Sir Leicester
Dedlock’s house in town; and to-morrow morning he will be walk-
ing on the leads at Chesney Wold, where erst the old man walked
whose ghost is propitiated with a hundred guineas. Drawers, desks,
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the deceased’s house. “And so you are. And so you are! And very well
indeed you are looking, Mrs. Bucket!”
The procession has not started yet, but is waiting for the cause of
its assemblage to be brought out. Mr. Bucket, in the foremost em-
blazoned carriage, uses his two fat forefingers to hold the lattice a
hair’s breadth open while he looks.
And it says a great deal for his attachment, as a husband, that he is
still occupied with Mrs. B. “There you are, my partner, eh?” he
murmuringly repeats. “And our lodger with you. I’m taking notice
of you, Mrs. Bucket; I hope you’re all right in your health, my dear!”
Not another word does Mr. Bucket say, but sits with most atten-
tive eyes until the sacked depository of noble secrets is brought
down—Where are all those secrets now? Does he keep them yet?
Did they fly with him on that sudden journey?—and until the pro-
cession moves, and Mr. Bucket’s view is changed. After which he
composes himself for an easy ride and takes note of the fittings of the
carriage in case he should ever find such knowledge useful.
Contrast enough between Mr. Tulkinghorn shut up in his dark
carriage and Mr. Bucket shut up in his. Between the immeasurable
track of space beyond the little wound that has thrown the one into
the fixed sleep which jolts so heavily over the stones of the streets,
and the narrow track of blood which keeps the other in the watchful
state expressed in every hair of his head! But it is all one to both;
neither is troubled about that.
Mr. Bucket sits out the procession in his own easy manner and
glides from the carriage when the opportunity he has settled with
himself arrives. He makes for Sir Leicester Dedlock’s, which is at
present a sort of home to him, where he comes and goes as he likes at
all hours’, where he is always welcome and made much of, where he
knows the whole establishment, and walks in an atmosphere of mys-
terious greatness.
No knocking or ringing for Mr. Bucket. He has caused himself to
be provided with a key and can pass in at his pleasure. As he is cross-
ing the hall, Mercury informs him, “Here’s another letter for you,
Mr. Bucket, come by post,” and gives it him.
“Another one, eh?” says Mr. Bucket.
If Mercury should chance to be possessed by any lingering curios-
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ity as to Mr. Bucket’s letters, that wary person is not the man to
gratify it. Mr. Bucket looks at him as if his face were a vista of some
miles in length and he were leisurely contemplating the same.
“Do you happen to carry a box?” says Mr. Bucket.
Unfortunately Mercury is no snuff-taker.
“Could you fetch me a pinch from anywheres?” says Mr. Bucket.
“Thankee. It don’t matter what it is; I’m not particular as to the
kind. Thankee!”
Having leisurely helped himself from a canister borrowed from
somebody downstairs for the purpose, and having made a consider-
able show of tasting it, first with one side of his nose and then with
the other, Mr. Bucket, with much deliberation, pronounces it of the
right sort and goes on, letter in hand.
Now although Mr. Bucket walks upstairs to the little library within
the larger one with the face of a man who receives some scores of
letters every day, it happens that much correspondence is not inci-
dental to his life. He is no great scribe, rather handling his pen like
the pocket-staff he carries about with him always convenient to his
grasp, and discourages correspondence with himself in others as be-
ing too artless and direct a way of doing delicate business. Further, he
often sees damaging letters produced in evidence and has occasion to
reflect that it was a green thing to write them. For these reasons he
has very little to do with letters, either as sender or receiver. And yet
he has received a round half-dozen within the last twenty-four hours.
“And this,” says Mr. Bucket, spreading it out on the table, “is in
the same hand, and consists of the same two words.”
What two words?
He turns the key in the door, ungirdles his black pocket-book
(book of fate to many), lays another letter by it, and reads, boldly
written in each, “Lady Dedlock.”
“Yes, yes,” says Mr. Bucket. “But I could have made the money
without this anonymous information.”
Having put the letters in his book of fate and girdled it up again, he
unlocks the door just in time to admit his dinner, which is brought upon
a goodly tray with a decanter of sherry. Mr. Bucket frequently observes, in
friendly circles where there is no restraint, that he likes a toothful of your
fine old brown East Inder sherry better than anything you can offer him.
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Consequently he fills and empties his glass with a smack of his lips and is
proceeding with his refreshment when an idea enters his mind.
Mr. Bucket softly opens the door of communication between that
room and the next and looks in. The library is deserted, and the fire
is sinking low. Mr. Bucket’s eye, after taking a pigeon-flight round
the room, alights upon a table where letters are usually put as they
arrive. Several letters for Sir Leicester are upon it. Mr. Bucket draws
near and examines the directions. “No,” he says, “there’s none in that
hand. It’s only me as is written to. I can break it to Sir Leicester
Dedlock, Baronet, to-morrow.”
With that he returns to finish his dinner with a good appetite, and
after a light nap, is summoned into the drawing-room. Sir Leicester
has received him there these several evenings past to know whether
he has anything to report. The debilitated cousin (much exhausted
by the funeral) and Volumnia are in attendance.
Mr. Bucket makes three distinctly different bows to these three
people. A bow of homage to Sir Leicester, a bow of gallantry to
Volumnia, and a bow of recognition to the debilitated Cousin, to
whom it airily says, “You are a swell about town, and you know me,
and I know you.” Having distributed these little specimens of his
tact, Mr. Bucket rubs his hands.
“Have you anything new to communicate, officer?” inquires Sir
Leicester. “Do you wish to hold any conversation with me in private?”
“Why—not tonight, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet.”
“Because my time,” pursues Sir Leicester, “is wholly at your disposal
with a view to the vindication of the outraged majesty of the law.”
Mr. Bucket coughs and glances at Volumnia, rouged and necklaced,
as though he would respectfully observe, “I do assure you, you’re a
pretty creetur. I’ve seen hundreds worse looking at your time of life,
I have indeed.”
The fair Volumnia, not quite unconscious perhaps of the human-
izing influence of her charms, pauses in the writing of cocked-hat
notes and meditatively adjusts the pearl necklace. Mr. Bucket prices
that decoration in his mind and thinks it as likely as not that Volumnia
is writing poetry.
“If I have not,” pursues Sir Leicester, “in the most emphatic man-
ner, adjured you, officer, to exercise your utmost skill in this atro-
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confirm what I’ve mentioned to this lady. You don’t want to be told
that from information I have received I have gone to work. You’re up
to what a lady can’t be expected to be up to. Lord! Especially in your
elevated station of society, miss,” says Mr. Bucket, quite reddening at
another narrow escape from “my dear.”
“The officer, Volumnia,” observes Sir Leicester, “is faithful to his
duty, and perfectly right.”
Mr. Bucket murmurs, “Glad to have the honour of your approba-
tion, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet.”
“In fact, Volumnia,” proceeds Sir Leicester, “it is not holding up a
good model for imitation to ask the officer any such questions as
you have put to him. He is the best judge of his own responsibility;
he acts upon his responsibility. And it does not become us, who
assist in making the laws, to impede or interfere with those who
carry them into execution. Or,” says Sir Leicester somewhat sternly,
for Volumnia was going to cut in before he had rounded his sen-
tence, “or who vindicate their outraged majesty.”
Volumnia with all humility explains that she had not merely the
plea of curiosity to urge (in common with the giddy youth of her sex
in general) but that she is perfectly dying with regret and interest for
the darling man whose loss they all deplore.
“Very well, Volumnia,” returns Sir Leicester. “Then you cannot be
too discreet.”
Mr. Bucket takes the opportunity of a pause to be heard again.
“Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, I have no objections to telling
this lady, with your leave and among ourselves, that I look upon the
case as pretty well complete. It is a beautiful case—a beautiful case—
and what little is wanting to complete it, I expect to be able to sup-
ply in a few hours.”
“I am very glad indeed to hear it,” says Sir Leicester. “Highly cred-
itable to you.”
“Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet,” returns Mr. Bucket very seri-
ously, “I hope it may at one and the same time do me credit and
prove satisfactory to all. When I depict it as a beautiful case, you see,
miss,” Mr. Bucket goes on, glancing gravely at Sir Leicester, “I mean
from my point of view. As considered from other points of view,
such cases will always involve more or less unpleasantness. Very strange
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CHAPTER LIV
Springing a Mine
REFRESHED BY SLEEP, Mr. Bucket rises betimes in the morning and
prepares for a field-day. Smartened up by the aid of a clean shirt and
a wet hairbrush, with which instrument, on occasions of ceremony,
he lubricates such thin locks as remain to him after his life of severe
study, Mr. Bucket lays in a breakfast of two mutton chops as a foun-
dation to work upon, together with tea, eggs, toast, and marmalade
on a corresponding scale. Having much enjoyed these strengthening
matters and having held subtle conference with his familiar demon,
he confidently instructs Mercury “just to mention quietly to Sir Le-
icester Dedlock, Baronet, that whenever he’s ready for me, I’m ready
for him.” A gracious message being returned that Sir Leicester will
expedite his dressing and join Mr. Bucket in the library within ten
minutes, Mr. Bucket repairs to that apartment and stands before the
fire with his finger on his chin, looking at the blazing coals.
Thoughtful Mr. Bucket is, as a man may be with weighty work to
do, but composed, sure, confident. From the expression of his face
he might be a famous whist-player for a large stake—say a hundred
guineas certain—with the game in his hand, but with a high reputa-
tion involved in his playing his hand out to the last card in a masterly
way. Not in the least anxious or disturbed is Mr. Bucket when Sir
Leicester appears, but he eyes the baronet aside as he comes slowly to
his easy-chair with that observant gravity of yesterday in which there
might have been yesterday, but for the audacity of the idea, a touch
of compassion.
“I am sorry to have kept you waiting, officer, but I am rather later than
my usual hour this morning. I am not well. The agitation and the indig-
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nation from which I have recently suffered have been too much for me.
I am subject to—gout”—Sir Leicester was going to say indisposition
and would have said it to anybody else, but Mr. Bucket palpably knows
all about it—”and recent circumstances have brought it on.”
As he takes his seat with some difficulty and with an air of pain,
Mr. Bucket draws a little nearer, standing with one of his large hands
on the library-table.
“I am not aware, officer,” Sir Leicester observes; raising his eyes to
his face, “whether you wish us to be alone, but that is entirely as you
please. If you do, well and good. If not, Miss Dedlock would be
interested—”
“Why, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet,” returns Mr. Bucket with his
head persuasively on one side and his forefinger pendant at one ear like
an earring, “we can’t be too private just at present. You will presently see
that we can’t be too private. A lady, under the circumstances, and espe-
cially in Miss Dedlock’s elevated station of society, can’t but be agree-
able to me, but speaking without a view to myself, I will take the
liberty of assuring you that I know we can’t be too private.”
“That is enough.”
“So much so, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet,” Mr. Bucket resumes,
“that I was on the point of asking your permission to turn the key in
the door.”
“By all means.” Mr. Bucket skilfully and softly takes that
precaution, stooping on his knee for a moment from mere force of
habit so to adjust the key in the lock as that no one shall peep in
from the outerside.
“Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, I mentioned yesterday evening that
I wanted but a very little to complete this case. I have now completed
it and collected proof against the person who did this crime.”
“Against the soldier?”
“No, Sir Leicester Dedlock; not the soldier.”
Sir Leicester looks astounded and inquires, “Is the man in
custody?”
Mr. Bucket tells him, after a pause, “It was a woman.”
Sir Leicester leans back in his chair, and breathlessly ejaculates,
“Good heaven!”
“Now, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet,” Mr. Bucket begins, stand-
ing over him with one hand spread out on the library-table and the
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“Lady Dedlock, you see she’s universally admired. That’s what her
ladyship is; she’s universally admired,” says Mr. Bucket.
“I would greatly prefer, officer,” Sir Leicester returns stiffly,
“my Lady’s name being entirely omitted from this discussion.”
“So would I, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, but—it’s impossible.”
“Impossible?”
Mr. Bucket shakes his relentless head.
“Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, it’s altogether impossible. What I
have got to say is about her ladyship. She is the pivot it all turns on.”
“Officer,” retorts Sir Leicester with a fiery eye and a quivering lip,
“you know your duty. Do your duty, but be careful not to overstep
it. I would not suffer it. I would not endure it. You bring my Lady’s
name into this communication upon your responsibility—upon your
responsibility. My Lady’s name is not a name for common persons
to trifle with!”
“Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, I say what I must say, and no
more.”
“I hope it may prove so. Very well. Go on. Go on, sir!” Glancing
at the angry eyes which now avoid him and at the angry figure trem-
bling from head to foot, yet striving to be still, Mr. Bucket feels his
way with his forefinger and in a low voice proceeds.
“Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, it becomes my duty to tell you
that the deceased Mr. Tulkinghorn long entertained mistrusts and
suspicions of Lady Dedlock.”
“If he had dared to breathe them to me, sir—which he never did—
I would have killed him myself!” exclaims Sir Leicester, striking his
hand upon the table. But in the very heat and fury of the act he stops,
fixed by the knowing eyes of Mr. Bucket, whose forefinger is slowly
going and who, with mingled confidence and patience, shakes his head.
“Sir Leicester Dedlock, the deceased Mr. Tulkinghorn was deep and
close, and what he fully had in his mind in the very beginning I can’t
quite take upon myself to say. But I know from his lips that he long
ago suspected Lady Dedlock of having discovered, through the sight
of some handwriting—in this very house, and when you yourself, Sir
Leicester Dedlock, were present—the existence, in great poverty, of a
certain person who had been her lover before you courted her and who
ought to have been her husband.” Mr. Bucket stops and deliberately
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repeats, “Ought to have been her husband, not a doubt about it. I
know from his lips that when that person soon afterwards died, he
suspected Lady Dedlock of visiting his wretched lodging and his
wretched grave, alone and in secret. I know from my own inquiries
and through my eyes and ears that Lady Dedlock did make such visit
in the dress of her own maid, for the deceased Mr. Tulkinghorn em-
ployed me to reckon up her ladyship—if you’ll excuse my making use
of the term we commonly employ—and I reckoned her up, so far,
completely. I confronted the maid in the chambers in Lincoln’s Inn
Fields with a witness who had been Lady Dedlock’s guide, and there
couldn’t be the shadow of a doubt that she had worn the young woman’s
dress, unknown to her. Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, I did endeav-
our to pave the way a little towards these unpleasant disclosures yester-
day by saying that very strange things happened even in high families
sometimes. All this, and more, has happened in your own family, and
to and through your own Lady. It’s my belief that the deceased Mr.
Tulkinghorn followed up these inquiries to the hour of his death and
that he and Lady Dedlock even had bad blood between them upon the
matter that very night. Now, only you put that to Lady Dedlock, Sir
Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, and ask her ladyship whether, even after
he had left here, she didn’t go down to his chambers with the intention
of saying something further to him, dressed in a loose black mantle
with a deep fringe to it.”
Sir Leicester sits like a statue, gazing at the cruel finger that is prob-
ing the life-blood of his heart.
“You put that to her ladyship, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, from
me, Inspector Bucket of the Detective. And if her ladyship makes
any difficulty about admitting of it, you tell her that it’s no use, that
Inspector Bucket knows it and knows that she passed the soldier as
you called him (though he’s not in the army now) and knows that
she knows she passed him on the staircase. Now, Sir Leicester Dedlock,
Baronet, why do I relate all this?”
Sir Leicester, who has covered his face with his hands, uttering a
single groan, requests him to pause for a moment. By and by he
takes his hands away, and so preserves his dignity and outward calm-
ness, though there is no more colour in his face than in his white hair,
that Mr. Bucket is a little awed by him. Something frozen and fixed
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is upon his manner, over and above its usual shell of haughtiness, and
Mr. Bucket soon detects an unusual slowness in his speech, with
now and then a curious trouble in beginning, which occasions him
to utter inarticulate sounds. With such sounds he now breaks silence,
soon, however, controlling himself to say that he does not compre-
hend why a gentleman so faithful and zealous as the late Mr.
Tulkinghorn should have communicated to him nothing of this pain-
ful, this distressing, this unlooked-for, this overwhelming, this in-
credible intelligence.
“Again, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet,” returns Mr. Bucket, “put
it to her ladyship to clear that up. Put it to her ladyship, if you think
it right, from Inspector Bucket of the Detective. You’ll find, or I’m
much mistaken, that the deceased Mr. Tulkinghorn had the inten-
tion of communicating the whole to you as soon as he considered it
ripe, and further, that he had given her ladyship so to understand.
Why, he might have been going to reveal it the very morning when I
examined the body! You don’t know what I’m going to say and do
five minutes from this present time, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet;
and supposing I was to be picked off now, you might wonder why I
hadn’t done it, don’t you see?”
True. Sir Leicester, avoiding, with some trouble those obtrusive
sounds, says, “True.” At this juncture a considerable noise of voices is
heard in the hall. Mr. Bucket, after listening, goes to the library-
door, softly unlocks and opens it, and listens again. Then he draws in
his head and whispers hurriedly but composedly, “Sir Leicester
Dedlock, Baronet, this unfortunate family affair has taken air, as I
expected it might, the deceased Mr. Tulkinghorn being cut down so
sudden. The chance to hush it is to let in these people now in a
wrangle with your footmen. Would you mind sitting quiet—on the
family account—while I reckon ‘em up? And would you just throw
in a nod when I seem to ask you for it?”
Sir Leicester indistinctly answers, “Officer. The best you can, the
best you can!” and Mr. Bucket, with a nod and a sagacious crook of
the forefinger, slips down into the hall, where the voices quickly die
away. He is not long in returning; a few paces ahead of Mercury and
a brother deity also powdered and in peach-blossomed smalls, who
bear between them a chair in which is an incapable old man. Another
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man and two women come behind. Directing the pitching of the
chair in an affable and easy manner, Mr. Bucket dismisses the Mercu-
ries and locks the door again. Sir Leicester looks on at this invasion
of the sacred precincts with an icy stare.
“Now, perhaps you may know me, ladies and gentlemen,” says
Mr. Bucket in a confidential voice. “I am Inspector Bucket of the
Detective, I am; and this,” producing the tip of his convenient little
staff from his breast-pocket, “is my authority. Now, you wanted to
see Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet. Well! You do see him, and mind
you, it ain’t every one as is admitted to that honour. Your name, old
gentleman, is Smallweed; that’s what your name is; I know it well.”
“Well, and you never heard any harm of it!” cries Mr. Smallweed
in a shrill loud voice.
“You don’t happen to know why they killed the pig, do you?”
retorts Mr. Bucket with a steadfast look, but without loss of temper.
“No!”
“Why, they killed him,” says Mr. Bucket, “on account of his hav-
ing so much cheek. Don’t you get into the same position, because it
isn’t worthy of you. You ain’t in the habit of conversing with a deaf
person, are you?”
“Yes,” snarls Mr. Smallweed, “my wife’s deaf.”
“That accounts for your pitching your voice so high. But as she
ain’t here; just pitch it an octave or two lower, will you, and I’ll not
only be obliged to you, but it’ll do you more credit,” says Mr. Bucket.
“This other gentleman is in the preaching line, I think?”
“Name of Chadband,” Mr. Smallweed puts in, speaking hence-
forth in a much lower key.
“Once had a friend and brother serjeant of the same name,” says
Mr. Bucket, offering his hand, “and consequently feel a liking for it.
Mrs. Chadband, no doubt?”
“And Mrs. Snagsby,” Mr. Smallweed introduces.
“Husband a law-stationer and a friend of my own,” says Mr. Bucket.
“Love him like a brother! Now, what’s up?”
“Do you mean what business have we come upon?” Mr. Smallweed
asks, a little dashed by the suddenness of this turn.
“Ah! You know what I mean. Let us hear what it’s all about in
presence of Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet. Come.”
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the vagabond dragoon had any hand in it, he was only an accomplice,
and was set on. You know what I mean as well as any man.”
“Now I tell you what,” says Mr. Bucket, instantaneously altering
his manner, coming close to him, and communicating an extraordi-
nary fascination to the forefinger, “I am damned if I am a-going to
have my case spoilt, or interfered with, or anticipated by so much as
half a second of time by any human being in creation. you want more
painstaking and search-making! you do? Do you see this hand, and
do you think that I don’t know the right time to stretch it out and
put it on the arm that fired that shot?”
Such is the dread power of the man, and so terribly evident it is
that he makes no idle boast, that Mr. Smallweed begins to apologize.
Mr. Bucket, dismissing his sudden anger, checks him.
“The advice I give you is, don’t you trouble your head about the
murder. That’s my affair. You keep half an eye on the newspapers,
and I shouldn’t wonder if you was to read something about it before
long, if you look sharp. I know my business, and that’s all I’ve got to
say to you on that subject. Now about those letters. You want to
know who’s got ‘em. I don’t mind telling you. I have got ‘em. Is that
the packet?”
Mr. Smallweed looks, with greedy eyes, at the little bundle Mr.
Bucket produces from a mysterious part of his coat, and identifles it
as the same.
“What have you got to say next?” asks Mr. Bucket. “Now, don’t
open your mouth too wide, because you don’t look handsome when
you do it.”
“I want five hundred pound.”
“No, you don’t; you mean fifty,” says Mr. Bucket humorously.
It appears, however, that Mr. Smallweed means five hundred.
“That is, I am deputed by Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, to con-
sider (without admitting or promising anything) this bit of busi-
ness,” says Mr. Bucket—Sir Leicester mechanically bows his head—
”and you ask me to consider a proposal of five hundred pounds.
Why, it’s an unreasonable proposal! Two fifty would be bad enough,
but better than that. Hadn’t you better say two fifty?”
Mr. Smallweed is quite clear that he had better not.
“Then,” says Mr. Bucket, “let’s hear Mr. Chadband. Lord! Many a
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mill of jealousy.
While this exordium is in hand—and it takes some time—Mr.
Bucket, who has seen through the transparency of Mrs. Snagsby’s
vinegar at a glance, confers with his familiar demon and bestows his
shrewd attention on the Chadbands and Mr. Smallweed. Sir Leices-
ter Dedlock remains immovable, with the same icy surface upon
him, except that he once or twice looks towards Mr. Bucket, as rely-
ing on that officer alone of all mankind.
“Very good,” says Mr. Bucket. “Now I understand you, you know,
and being deputed by Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, to look into
this little matter,” again Sir Leicester mechanically bows in confirma-
tion of the statement, “can give it my fair and full attention. Now I
won’t allude to conspiring to extort money or anything of that sort,
because we are men and women of the world here, and our object is
to make things pleasant. But I tell you what I do wonder at; I am
surprised that you should think of making a noise below in the hall.
It was so opposed to your interests. That’s what I look at.”
“We wanted to get in,” pleads Mr. Smallweed.
“Why, of course you wanted to get in,” Mr. Bucket asserts with
cheerfulness; “but for a old gentleman at your time of life—what I
call truly venerable, mind you!—with his wits sharpened, as I have
no doubt they are, by the loss of the use of his limbs, which occa-
sions all his animation to mount up into his head, not to consider
that if he don’t keep such a business as the present as close as possible
it can’t be worth a mag to him, is so curious! You see your temper got
the better of you; that’s where you lost ground,” says Mr. Bucket in
an argumentative and friendly way.
“I only said I wouldn’t go without one of the servants came up to
Sir Leicester Dedlock,” returns Mr. Smallweed.
“That’s it! That’s where your temper got the better of you. Now,
you keep it under another time and you’ll make money by it. Shall I
ring for them to carry you down?”
“When are we to hear more of this?” Mrs. Chadband sternly de-
mands.
“Bless your heart for a true woman! Always curious, your
delightful sex is!” replies Mr. Bucket with gallantry. “I shall
have the pleasure of giving you a call to-morrow or next day—not
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puts his back against it. The suddenness of the noise occasions her to
turn, and then for the first time she sees Sir Leicester Dedlock in his chair.
“I ask you pardon,” she mutters hurriedly. “They tell me there was
no one here.”
Her step towards the door brings her front to front with Mr. Bucket.
Suddenly a spasm shoots across her face and she turns deadly pale.
“This is my lodger, Sir Leicester Dedlock,” says Mr. Bucket,
nodding at her. “This foreign young woman has been my lodger for
some weeks back.”
“What do Sir Leicester care for that, you think, my angel?” returns
mademoiselle in a jocular strain.
“Why, my angel,” returns Mr. Bucket, “we shall see.”
Mademoiselle Hortense eyes him with a scowl upon her tight face,
which gradually changes into a smile of scorn, “You are very
mysterieuse. Are you drunk?”
“Tolerable sober, my angel,” returns Mr. Bucket.
“I come from arriving at this so detestable house with your wife.
Your wife have left me since some minutes. They tell me downstairs
that your wife is here. I come here, and your wife is not here. What is
the intention of this fool’s play, say then?” mademoiselle demands,
with her arms composedly crossed, but with something in her dark
cheek beating like a clock.
Mr. Bucket merely shakes the finger at her.
“Ah, my God, you are an unhappy idiot!” cries mademoiselle with a
toss of her head and a laugh. “Leave me to pass downstairs, great pig.”
With a stamp of her foot and a menace.
“Now, mademoiselle,” says Mr. Bucket in a cool determined way,
“you go and sit down upon that sofy.”
“I will not sit down upon nothing,” she replies with a shower of nods.
“Now, mademoiselle,” repeats Mr. Bucket, making no demon-
stration except with the finger, “you sit down upon that sofy.”
“Why?”
“Because I take you into custody on a charge of murder, and you
don’t need to be told it. Now, I want to be polite to one of your sex
and a foreigner if I can. If I can’t, I must be rough, and there’s rougher
ones outside. What I am to be depends on you. So I recommend
you, as a friend, afore another half a blessed moment has passed over
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on the occasion I told you of at his chambers, though she was liber-
ally paid for her time and trouble.”
“Lie!” cries mademoiselle. “I ref-use his money all togezzer.”
“If you will parlay, you know,” says Mr. Bucket parenthetically,
“you must take the consequences. Now, whether she became my
lodger, Sir Leicester Dedlock, with any deliberate intention then of
doing this deed and blinding me, I give no opinion on; but she lived
in my house in that capacity at the time that she was hovering about
the chambers of the deceased Mr. Tulkinghorn with a view to a
wrangle, and likewise persecuting and half frightening the life out of
an unfortunate stationer.”
“Lie!” cries mademoiselle. “All lie!”
“The murder was commttted, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, and
you know under what circumstances. Now, I beg of you to follow
me close with your attention for a minute or two. I was sent for, and
the case was entrusted to me. I examined the place, and the body, and
the papers, and everything. From information I received (from a clerk
in the same house) I took George into custody as having been seen
hanging about there on the night, and at very nigh the time of the
murder, also as having been overheard in high words
with the deceased on former occasions—even threatening him, as
the witness made out. If you ask me, Sir Leicester Dedlock, whether
from the first I believed George to be the murderer, I tell you can-
didly no, but he might be, notwithstanding, and there was enough
against him to make it my duty to take him and get him kept under
remand. Now, observe!”
As Mr. Bucket bends forward in some excitement—for him—and
inaugurates what he is going to say with one ghostly beat of his forefin-
ger in the air, Mademoiselle Hortense fixes her black eyes upon him
with a dark frown and sets her dry lips closely and firmly together.
“I went home, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, at night and found
this young woman having supper with my wife, Mrs. Bucket. She had
made a mighty show of being fond of Mrs. Bucket from her first
offering herself as our lodger, but that night she made more than ever—
in fact, overdid it. Likewise she overdid her respect, and all that, for the
lamented memory of the deceased Mr. Tulkinghorn. By the living
Lord it flashed upon me, as I sat opposite to her at the table and saw
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her with a knife in her hand, that she had done it!”
Mademoiselle is hardly audible in straining through her teeth and
lips the words, “You are a devil.”
“Now where,” pursues Mr. Bucket, “had she been on the night of the
murder? She had been to the theayter. (She really was there, I have since
found, both before the deed and after it.) I knew I had an artful cus-
tomer to deal with and that proof would be very difficult; and I laid a
trap for her—such a trap as I never laid yet, and such a venture as I never
made yet. I worked it out in my mind while I was talking to her at
supper. When I went upstairs to bed, our house being small and this
young woman’s ears sharp, I stuffed the sheet into Mrs. Bucket’s mouth
that she shouldn’t say a word of surprise and told her all about it. My
dear, don’t you give your mind to that again, or I shall link your feet
together at the ankles.” Mr. Bucket, breaking off, has made a noiseless
descent upon mademoiselle and laid his heavy hand upon her shoulder.
“What is the matter with you now?” she asks him.
“Don’t you think any more,” returns Mr. Bucket with admoni-
tory finger, “of throwing yourself out of window. That’s what’s the
matter with me. Come! Just take my arm. You needn’t get up; I’ll sit
down by you. Now take my arm, will you? I’m a married man, you
know; you’re acquainted with my wife. Just take my arm.”
Vaiuly endeavouring to moisten those dry lips, with a painful sound
she struggles with herself and complies.
“Now we’re all right again. Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, this
case could never have been the case it is but for Mrs. Bucket, who is
a woman in fifty thousand—in a hundred and fifty thousand! To
throw this young woman off her guard, I have never set foot in our
house since, though I’ve communicated with Mrs. Bucket in the
baker’s loaves and in the milk as often as required. My whispered
words to Mrs. Bucket when she had the sheet in her mouth were,
‘My dear, can you throw her off continually with natural accounts of
my suspicions against George, and this, and that, and t’other? Can
you do without rest and keep watch upon her night and day? Can
you undertake to say, “She shall do nothing without my knowledge,
she shall be my prisoner without suspecting it, she shall no more
escape from me than from death, and her life shall be my life, and
her soul my soul, till I have got her, if she did this murder?”’ Mrs.
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No. But when my foreign friend here is so thoroughly off her guard
as to think it a safe time to tear up the rest of that leaf, and when Mrs.
Bucket puts the pieces together and finds the wadding wanting, it
begins to look like Queer Street.”
“These are very long lies,” mademoiselle interposes. “You prose
great deal. Is it that you have almost all finished, or are you speaking
always?”
“Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet,” proceeds Mr. Bucket, who de-
lights in a full title and does violence to himself when he dispenses
with any fragment of it, “the last point in the case which I am now
going to mention shows the necessity of patience in our business,
and never doing a thing in a hurry. I watched this young woman
yesterday without her knowledge when she was looking at the fu-
neral, in company with my wife, who planned to take her there; and
I had so much to convict her, and I saw such an expression in her
face, and my mind so rose against her malice towards her ladyship,
and the time was altogether such a time for bringing down what you
may call retribution upon her, that if I had been a younger hand with
less experience, I should have taken her, certain. Equally, last night,
when her ladyship, as is so universally admired I am sure, come home
looking—why, Lord, a man might almost say like Venus rising from
the ocean—it was so unpleasant and inconsistent to think of her
being charged with a murder of which she was innocent that I felt
quite to want to put an end to the job. What should I have lost? Sir
Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, I should have lost the weapon. My pris-
oner here proposed to Mrs. Bucket, after the departure of the fu-
neral, that they should go per bus a little ways into the country and
take tea at a very decent house of entertainment. Now, near that
house of entertainment there’s a piece of water. At tea, my prisoner
got up to fetch her pocket handkercher from the bedroom where the
bonnets was; she was rather a long time gone and came back a little
out of wind. As soon as they came home this was reported to me by
Mrs. Bucket, along with her observations and suspicions. I had the
piece of water dragged by moonlight, in presence of a couple of our
men, and the pocket pistol was brought up before it had been there
half-a-dozen hours. Now, my dear, put your arm a little further
through mine, and hold it steady, and I shan’t hurt you!”
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CHAPTER LV
Flight
INSPECTOR BUCKET OF THE Detective has not yet struck his great blow,
as just now chronicled, but is yet refreshing himself with sleep prepara-
tory to his field-day, when through the night and along the freezing
wintry roads a chaise and pair comes out of Lincolnshire, making its
way towards London.
Railroads shall soon traverse all this country, and with a rattle and
a glare the engine and train shall shoot like a meteor over the wide
night-landscape, turning the moon paler; but as yet such things are
non-existent in these parts, though not wholly unexpected. Prepara-
tions are afoot, measurements are made, ground is staked out. Bridges
are begun, and their not yet united piers desolately look at one an-
other over roads and streams like brick and mortar couples with an
obstacle to their union; fragments of embankments are thrown up
and left as precipices with torrents of rusty carts and barrows tum-
bling over them; tripods of tall poles appear on hilltops, where there
are rumours of tunnels; everything looks chaotic and abandoned in
full hopelessness. Along the freezing roads, and through the night,
the post-chaise makes its way without a railroad on its mind.
Mrs. Rouncewell, so many years housekeeper at Chesney Wold,
sits within the chaise; and by her side sits Mrs. Bagnet with her grey
cloak and umbrella. The old girl would prefer the bar in front, as
being exposed to the weather and a primitive sort of perch more in
accordance with her usual course of travelling, but Mrs. Rouncewell
is too thoughtful of her comfort to admit of her proposing it. The
old lady cannot make enough of the old girl. She sits, in her stately
manner, holding her hand, and regardless of its roughness, puts it
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often to her lips. “You are a mother, my dear soul,” says she many
times, “and you found out my George’s mother!”
“Why, George,” returns Mrs. Bagnet, “was always free with me,
ma’am, and when he said at our house to my Woolwich that of all
the things my Woolwich could have to think of when he grew to be
a man, the comfortablest would be that he had never brought a sor-
rowful line into his mother’s face or turned a hair of her head grey,
then I felt sure, from his way, that something fresh had brought his
own mother into his mind. I had often known him say to me, in
past times, that he had behaved bad to her.”
“Never, my dear!” returns Mrs. Rouncewell, bursting into tears.
“My blessing on him, never! He was always fond of me, and loving
to me, was my George! But he had a bold spirit, and he ran a little
wild and went for a soldier. And I know he waited at first, in letting
us know about himself, till he should rise to be an officer; and when
he didn’t rise, I know he considered himself beneath us, and wouldn’t
be a disgrace to us. For he had a lion heart, had my George, always
from a baby!”
The old lady’s hands stray about her as of yore, while she recalls,
all in a tremble, what a likely lad, what a fine lad, what a gay good-
humoured clever lad he was; how they all took to him down at
Chesney Wold; how Sir Leicester took to him when he was a young
gentleman; how the dogs took to him; how even the people who
had been angry with him forgave him the moment he was gone,
poor boy. And now to see him after all, and in a prison too! And the
broad stomacher heaves, and the quaint upright old-fashioned figure
bends under its load of affectionate distress.
Mrs. Bagnet, with the instinctive skill of a good warm heart, leaves
the old housekeeper to her emotions for a little while—not without
passing the back of her hand across her own motherly eyes—and
presently chirps up in her cheery manner, “So I says to George when
I goes to call him in to tea (he pretended to be smoking his pipe
outside), ‘What ails you this afternoon, George, for gracious sake? I
have seen all sorts, and I have seen you pretty often in season and out
of season, abroad and at home, and I never see you so melancholy
penitent.’ ‘Why, Mrs. Bagnet,’ says George, ‘it’s because I am melan-
choly and penitent both, this afternoon, that you see me so.’ ‘What
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have you done, old fellow?’ I says. ‘Why, Mrs. Bagnet,’ says George,
shaking his head, ‘what I have done has been done this many a long
year, and is best not tried to be undone now. If I ever get to heaven it
won’t be for being a good son to a widowed mother; I say no more.’
Now, ma’am, when George says to me that it’s best not tried to be
undone now, I have my thoughts as I have often had before, and I
draw it out of George how he comes to have such things on him that
afternoon. Then George tells me that he has seen by chance, at the
lawyer’s office, a fine old lady that has brought his mother plain
before him, and he runs on about that old lady till he quite forgets
himself and paints her picture to me as she used to be, years upon
years back. So I says to George when he has done, who is this old
lady he has seen? And George tells me it’s Mrs. Rouncewell, house-
keeper for more than half a century to the Dedlock family down at
Chesney Wold in Lincolnshire. George has frequently told me be-
fore that he’s a Lincolnshire man, and I says to my old Lignum that
night, ‘Lignum, that’s his mother for five and for-ty pound!’”
All this Mrs. Bagnet now relates for the twentieth time at least
within the last four hours. Trilling it out like a kind of bird, with a
pretty high note, that it may be audible to the old lady above the
hum of the wheels.
“Bless you, and thank you,” says Mrs. Rouncewell. “Bless you,
and thank you, my worthy soul!”
“Dear heart!” cries Mrs. Bagnet in the most natural manner. “No
thanks to me, I am sure. Thanks to yourself, ma’am, for being so
ready to pay ‘em! And mind once more, ma’am, what you had best
do on finding George to be your own son is to make him—for your
sake—have every sort of help to put himself in the right and clear
himself of a charge of which he is as innocent as you or me. It won’t
do to have truth and justice on his side; he must have law and law-
yers,” exclaims the old girl, apparently persuaded that the latter form
a separate establishment and have dissolved partnership with truth
and justice for ever and a day.
“He shall have,” says Mrs. Rouncewell, “all the help that can be
got for him in the world, my dear. I will spend all I have, and thank-
fully, to procure it. Sir Leicester will do his best, the whole family
will do their best. I—I know something, my dear; and will make my
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own appeal, as his mother parted from him all these years, and find-
ing him in a jail at last.”
The extreme disquietude of the old housekeeper’s manner in say-
ing this, her broken words, and her wringing of her hands make a
powerful impression on Mrs. Bagnet and would astonish her but
that she refers them all to her sorrow for her son’s condition. And yet
Mrs. Bagnet wonders too why Mrs. Rouncewell should murmur so
distractedly, “My Lady, my Lady, my Lady!” over and over again.
The frosty night wears away, and the dawn breaks, and the post-
chaise comes rolling on through the early mist like the ghost of a
chaise departed. It has plenty of spectral company in ghosts of trees
and hedges, slowly vanishing and giving place to the realities of day.
London reached, the travellers alight, the old housekeeper in great
tribulation and confusion, Mrs. Bagnet quite fresh and collected—as
she would be if her next point, with no new equipage and outfit,
were the Cape of Good Hope, the Island of Ascension, Hong Kong,
or any other military station.
But when they set out for the prison where the trooper is confined,
the old lady has managed to draw about her, with her lavender-coloured
dress, much of the staid calmness which is its usual accompaniment. A
wonderfully grave, precise, and handsome piece of old china she looks,
though her heart beats fast and her stomacher is ruffled more than even
the remembrance of this wayward son has ruffled it these many years.
Approaching the cell, they find the door opening and a warder in
the act of coming out. The old girl promptly makes a sign of en-
treaty to him to say nothing; assenting with a nod, he suffers them to
enter as he shuts the door.
So George, who is writing at his table, supposing himself to be
alone, does not raise his eyes, but remains absorbed. The old house-
keeper looks at him, and those wandering hands of hers are quite
enough for Mrs. Bagnet’s confirmation, even if she could see the
mother and the son together, knowing what she knows, and doubt
their relationship.
Not a rustle of the housekeeper’s dress, not a gesture, not a word
betrays her. She stands looking at him as he writes on, all uncon-
scious, and only her fluttering hands give utterance to her emotions.
But they are very eloquent, very, very eloquent. Mrs. Bagnet under-
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expressing himself and carrying himself and the softened tone in which
he speaks, interrupted occasionally by a half-stifled sob.
“So I wrote a line home, mother, as you too well know, to say I
had ‘listed under another name, and I went abroad. Abroad, at one
time I thought I would write home next year, when I might be better
off; and when that year was out, I thought I would write home next
year, when I might be better off; and when that year was out again,
perhaps I didn’t think much about it. So on, from year to year,
through a service of ten years, till I began to get older, and to ask
myself why should I ever write.”
“I don’t find any fault, child—but not to ease my mind, George?
Not a word to your loving mother, who was growing older too?”
This almost overturns the trooper afresh, but he sets himself up
with a great, rough, sounding clearance of his throat.
“Heaven forgive me, mother, but I thought there would be small
consolation then in hearing anything about me. There were you, re-
spected and esteemed. There was my brother, as I read in chance North
Country papers now and then, rising to be prosperous and famous.
There was I a dragoon, roving, unsettled, not self-made like him, but
self-unmade—all my earlier advantages thrown away, all my little learn-
ing unlearnt, nothing picked up but what unfitted me for most things
that I could think of. What business had I to make myself known?
After letting all that time go by me, what good could come of it? The
worst was past with you, mother. I knew by that time (being a man)
how you had mourned for me, and wept for me, and prayed for me;
and the pain was over, or was softened down, and I was better in your
mind as it was.”
The old lady sorrowfully shakes her head, and taking one of his
powerful hands, lays it lovingly upon her shoulder.
“No, I don’t say that it was so, mother, but that I made it out to be
so. I said just now, what good could come of it? Well, my dear mother,
some good might have come of it to myself—and there was the
meanness of it. You would have sought me out; you would have
purchased my discharge; you would have taken me down to Chesney
Wold; you would have brought me and my brother and my brother’s
family together; you would all have considered anxiously how to do
something for me and set me up as a respectable civilian. But how
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could any of you feel sure of me when I couldn’t so much as feel sure
of myself? How could you help regarding as an incumbrance and a
discredit to you an idle dragooning chap who was an incumbrance
and a discredit to himself, excepting under discipline? How could I
look my brother’s children in the face and pretend to set them an
example—I, the vagabond boy who had run away from home and
been the grief and unhappiness of my mother’s life? ‘No, George.’
Such were my words, mother, when I passed this in review before
me: ‘You have made your bed. Now, lie upon it.’”
Mrs. Rouncewell, drawing up her stately form, shakes her head at
the old girl with a swelling pride upon her, as much as to say, “I told
you so!” The old girl relieves her feelings and testifies her interest in
the conversation by giving the trooper a great poke between the shoul-
ders with her umbrella; this action she afterwards repeats, at inter-
vals, in a species of affectionate lunacy, never failing, after the admin-
istration of each of these remonstrances, to resort to the whitened
wall and the grey cloak again.
“This was the way I brought myself to think, mother, that my
best amends was to lie upon that bed I had made, and die upon it.
And I should have done it (though I have been to see you more than
once down at Chesney Wold, when you little thought of me) but for
my old comrade’s wife here, who I find has been too many for me.
But I thank her for it. I thank you for it, Mrs. Bagnet, with all my
heart and might.”
To which Mrs. Bagnet responds with two pokes.
And now the old lady impresses upon her son George, her own
dear recovered boy, her joy and pride, the light of her eyes, the happy
close of her life, and every fond name she can think of, that he must
be governed by the best advice obtainable by money and influence,
that he must yield up his case to the greatest lawyers that can be got,
that he must act in this serious plight as he shall be advised to act and
must not be self-willed, however right, but must promise to think
only of his poor old mother’s anxiety and suffering until he is re-
leased, or he will break her heart.
“Mother, ’tis little enough to consent to,” returns the trooper,
stopping her with a kiss; “tell me what I shall do, and I’ll make a
late beginning and do it. Mrs. Bagnet, you’ll take care of my mother,
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I know?”
A very hard poke from the old girl’s umbrella.
“If you’ll bring her acquainted with Mr. Jarndyce and Miss
Summerson, she will find them of her way of thinking, and they
will give her the best advice and assistance.”
“And, George,” says the old lady, “we must send with all haste for
your brother. He is a sensible sound man as they tell me—out in the
world beyond Chesney Wold, my dear, though I don’t know much of
it myself—and will be of great service.”
“Mother,” returns the trooper, “is it too soon to ask a favour?”
“Surely not, my dear.”
“Then grant me this one great favour. Don’t let my brother know.”
“Not know what, my dear?”
“Not know of me. In fact, mother, I can’t bear it; I can’t make up
my mmd to it. He has proved himself so different from me and has
done so much to raise himself while I’ve been soldiering that I haven’t
brass enough in my composition to see him in this place and under
this charge. How could a man like him be expected to have any
pleasure in such a discovery? It’s impossible. No, keep my secret from
him, mother; do me a greater kindness than I deserve and keep my
secret from my brother, of all men.”
“But not always, dear George?”
“Why, mother, perhaps not for good and all—though I may come
to ask that too—but keep it now, I do entreat you. If it’s ever
broke to him that his rip of a brother has turned up, I could wish,”
says the trooper, shaking his head very doubtfully, “to break it myself
and be governed as to advancing or retreating by the way in which
he seems to take it.”
As he evidently has a rooted feeling on this point, and as the depth
of it is recognized in Mrs. Bagnet’s face, his mother yields her im-
plicit assent to what he asks. For this he thanks her kindly.
“In all other respects, my dear mother, I’ll be as tractable and obedient
as you can wish; on this one alone, I stand out. So now I am ready even
for the lawyers. I have been drawing up,” he glances at his writing on the
table, “an exact account of what I knew of the deceased and how I came
to be involved in this unfortunate affair. It’s entered, plain and regular,
like an orderly-book; not a word in it but what’s wanted for the facts. I
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did intend to read it, straight on end, whensoever I was called upon to
say anything in my defence. I hope I may be let to do it still; but I have
no longer a will of my own in this case, and whatever is said or done, I
give my promise not to have any.”
Matters being brought to this so far satisfactory pass, and time
being on the wane, Mrs. Bagnet proposes a departure. Again and
again the old lady hangs upon her son’s neck, and again and again the
trooper holds her to his broad chest.
“Where are you going to take my mother, Mrs. Bagnet?”
“I am going to the town house, my dear, the family house. I have
some business there that must be looked to directly,” Mrs. Rouncewell
answers.
“Will you see my mother safe there in a coach, Mrs. Bagnet? But
of course I know you will. Why should I ask it!”
Why indeed, Mrs. Bagnet expresses with the umbrella.
“Take her, my old friend, and take my gratitude along with you.
Kisses to Quebec and Malta, love to my godson, a hearty shake of the
hand to Lignum, and this for yourself, and I wish it was ten thousand
pound in gold, my dear!” So saying, the trooper puts his lips to the old
girl’s tanned forehead, and the door shuts upon him in his cell.
No entreaties on the part of the good old housekeeper will induce
Mrs. Bagnet to retain the coach for her own conveyance home. Jump-
ing out cheerfully at the door of the Dedlock mansion and handing
Mrs. Rouncewell up the steps, the old girl shakes hands and trudges
off, arriving soon afterwards in the bosom of the Bagnet family and
falling to washing the greens as if nothing had happened.
My Lady is in that room in which she held her last conference
with the murdered man, and is sitting where she sat that night, and is
looking at the spot where he stood upon the hearth studying her so
leisurely, when a tap comes at the door. Who is it? Mrs. Rouncewell.
What has brought Mrs. Rouncewell to town so unexpectedly?
“Trouble, my Lady. Sad trouble. Oh, my Lady, may I beg a word
with you?”
What new occurrence is it that makes this tranquil old woman
tremble so? Far happier than her Lady, as her Lady has often thought,
why does she falter in this manner and look at her with such strange
mistrust?
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own way always without help, and you are not familiar with your
friends; and all who admire you—and all do—as a beautiful and el-
egant lady, know you to be one far away from themselves who can’t be
approached close. My Lady, you may have some proud or angry rea-
sons for disdaining to utter something that you know; if so, pray, oh,
pray, think of a faithful servant whose whole life has been passed in this
family which she dearly loves, and relent, and help to clear my son! My
Lady, my good Lady,” the old housekeeper pleads with genuine sim-
plicity, “I am so humble in my place and you are by nature so high and
distant that you may not think what I feel for my child, but I feel so
much that I have come here to make so bold as to beg and pray you
not to be scornful of us if you can do us any right or justice at this
fearful time!”
Lady Dedlock raises her without one word, until she takes the
letter from her hand.
“Am I to read this?”
“When I am gone, my Lady, if you please, and then remembering
the most that I consider possible.”
“I know of nothing I can do. I know of nothing I reserve that can
affect your son. I have never accused him.”
“My Lady, you may pity him the more under a false accusation
after reading the letter.”
The old housekeeper leaves her with the letter in her hand. In truth
she is not a hard lady naturally, and the time has been when the sight of
the venerable figure suing to her with such strong earnestness would have
moved her to great compassion. But so long accustomed to suppress
emotion and keep down reality, so long schooled for her own purposes
in that destructive school which shuts up the natural feelings of the heart
like flies in amber and spreads one uniform and dreary gloss over the
good and bad, the feeling and the unfeeling, the sensible and the sense-
less, she had subdued even her wonder until now.
She opens the letter. Spread out upon the paper is a printed
account of the discovery of the body as it lay face downward on the
floor, shot through the heart; and underneath is written her own
name, with the word “murderess” attached.
It falls out of her hand. How long it may have lain upon the ground
she knows not, but it lies where it fell when a servant stands before
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her announcing the young man of the name of Guppy. The words
have probably been repeated several times, for they are ringing in her
head before she begins to understand them.
“Let him come in!”
He comes in. Holding the letter in her hand, which she has taken
from the floor, she tries to collect her thoughts. In the eyes of Mr.
Guppy she is the same Lady Dedlock, holding the same prepared,
proud, chilling state.
“Your ladyship may not be at first disposed to excuse this visit
from one who has never been welcome to your ladyship”—which he
don’t complain of, for he is bound to confess that there never has
been any particular reason on the face of things why he should be—
“but I hope when I mention my motives to your ladyship you will
not find fault with me,” says Mr. Guppy.
“Do so.”
“Thank your ladyship. I ought first to explain to your ladyship,”
Mr. Guppy sits on the edge of a chair and puts his hat on the carpet
at his feet, “that Miss Summerson, whose image, as I formerly men-
tioned to your ladyship, was at one period of my life imprinted on
my ‘eart until erased by circumstances over which I had no control,
communicated to me, after I had the pleasure of waiting on your
ladyship last, that she particularly wished me to take no steps what-
ever in any manner at all relating to her. And Miss Summerson’s
wishes being to me a law (except as connected with circumstances
over which I have no control), I consequently never
expected to have the distinguished honour of waiting on your lady-
ship again.”
And yet he is here now, Lady Dedlock moodily reminds him.
“And yet I am here now,” Mr. Guppy admits. “My object being to
communicate to your ladyship, under the seal of confidence, why I
am here.”
He cannot do so, she tells him, too plainly or too briefly. “Nor
can I,” Mr. Guppy returns with a sense of injury upon him, “too
particularly request your ladyship to take particular notice that it’s no
personal affair of mine that brings me here. I have no interested views
of my own to serve in coming here. If it was not for my promise to
Miss Summerson and my keeping of it sacred—I, in point of fact,
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shouldn’t have darkened these doors again, but should have seen ‘em
further first.”
Mr. Guppy considers this a favourable moment for sticking up his
hair with both hands.
“Your ladyship will remember when I mention it that the last time
I was here I run against a party very eminent in our profession and
whose loss we all deplore. That party certainly did from that time
apply himself to cutting in against me in a way that I will call sharp
practice, and did make it, at every turn and point, extremely difficult
for me to be sure that I hadn’t inadvertently led up to something
contrary to Miss Summerson’s wishes. Self-praise is no recommen-
dation, but I may say for myself that I am not so bad a man of
business neither.”
Lady Dedlock looks at him in stern inquiry. Mr. Guppy immedi-
ately withdraws his eyes from her face and looks anywhere else.
“Indeed, it has been made so hard,” he goes on, “to have any idea
what that party was up to in combination with others that until the
loss which we all deplore I was gravelled—an expression which your
ladyship, moving in the higher circles, will be so good as to consider
tantamount to knocked over. Small likewise—a name by which I
refer to another party, a friend of mine that your ladyship is not
acquainted with—got to be so close and double-faced that at times it
wasn’t easy to keep one’s hands off his ‘ead. However, what with the
exertion of my humble abilities, and what with the help of a mutual
friend by the name of Mr. Tony Weevle (who is of a high aristocratic
turn and has your ladyship’s portrait always hanging up in his room),
I have now reasons for an apprehension as to which I come to put
your ladyship upon your guard. First, will your ladyship allow me to
ask you whether you have had any strange visitors this morning? I
don’t mean fashionable visitors, but such visitors, for instance, as
Miss Barbary’s old servant, or as a person without the use of his
lower extremities, carried upstairs similarly to a guy?”
“No!”
“Then I assure your ladyship that such visitors have been here and
have been received here. Because I saw them at the door, and waited
at the corner of the square till they came out, and took half an hour’s
turn afterwards to avoid them.”
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may be represented to have sent her favourite girl away so soon be-
fore merely to release herself from observation, she shudders as if the
hangman’s hands were at her neck.
She has thrown herself upon the floor and lies with her hair all
wildly scattered and her face buried in the cushions of a couch. She
rises up, hurries to and fro, flings herself down again, and rocks and
moans. The horror that is upon her is unutterable. If she really were
the murderess, it could hardly be, for the moment, more intense.
For as her murderous perspective, before the doing of the deed,
however subtle the precautions for its commission, would have been
closed up by a gigantic dilatation of the hateful figure, preventing her
from seeing any consequences beyond it; and as those consequences
would have rushed in, in an unimagined flood, the moment the
figure was laid low—which always happens when a murder is done;
so, now she sees that when he used to be on the watch before her, and
she used to think, “if some mortal stroke would but fall on this old
man and take him from my way!” it was but wishing that all he held
against her in his hand might be flung to the winds and chance-sown
in many places. So, too, with the wicked relief she has felt in his
death. What was his death but the key-stone of a gloomy arch re-
moved, and now the arch begins to fall in a thousand fragments,
each crushing and mangling piecemeal!
Thus, a terrible impression steals upon and overshadows her that
from this pursuer, living or dead—obdurate and imperturbable be-
fore her in his well-remembered shape, or not more obdurate and
imperturbable in his coffin-bed—there is no escape but in death.
Hunted, she flies. The complication of her shame, her dread, re-
morse, and misery, overwhelms her at its height; and even her strength
of self-reliance is overturned and whirled away like a leaf before a
mighty wind.
She hurriedly addresses these lines to her husband, seals, and leaves
them on her table:
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you. After he had left me, I went out on pretence of walking in the
garden where I sometimes walk, but really to follow him and make
one last petition that he would not protract the dreadful suspense on
which I have been racked by him, you do not know how long, but
would mercifully strike next morning.
I found his house dark and silent. I rang twice at his door, but
there was no reply, and I came home.
I have no home left. I will encumber you no more. May you, in
your just resentment, be able to forget the unworthy woman on
whom you have wasted a most generous devotion—who avoids you
only with a deeper shame than that with which she hurries from
herself—and who writes this last adieu.
She veils and dresses quickly, leaves all her jewels and her money,
listens, goes downstairs at a moment when the hall is empty, opens
and shuts the great door, flutters away in the shrill frosty wind.
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CHAPTER LVI
Pursuit
IMPASSIVE, AS BEHOVES ITS HIGH BREEDING, the Dedlock town house
stares at the other houses in the street of dismal grandeur and gives
no outward sign of anything going wrong within. Carriages rattle,
doors are battered at, the world exchanges calls; ancient charmers
with skeleton throats and peachy cheeks that have a rather ghastly
bloom upon them seen by daylight, when indeed these fascinating
creatures look like Death and the Lady fused together, dazzle the eyes
of men. Forth from the frigid mews come easily swinging carriages
guided by short-legged coachmen in flaxen wigs, deep sunk into
downy hammercloths, and up behind mount luscious Mercuries
bearing sticks of state and wearing cocked hats broadwise, a spectacle
for the angels.
The Dedlock town house changes not externally, and hours pass
before its exalted dullness is disturbed within. But Volumnia the fair,
being subject to the prevalent complaint of boredom and finding
that disorder attacking her spirits with some virulence, ventures at
length to repair to the library for change of scene. Her gentle tapping
at the door producing no response, she opens it and peeps in; seeing
no one there, takes possession.
The sprightly Dedlock is reputed, in that grass-grown city of the
ancients, Bath, to be stimulated by an urgent curiosity which impels
her on all convenient and inconvenient occasions to sidle about with
a golden glass at her eye, peering into objects of every description.
Certain it is that she avails herself of the present opportunity of hov-
ering over her kinsman’s letters and papers like a bird, taking a short
peck at this document and a blink with her head on one side at that
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document, and hopping about from table to table with her glass at
her eye in an inquisitive and restless manner. In the course of these
researches she stumbles over something, and turning her glass in that
direction, sees her kinsman lying on the ground like a felled tree.
Volumnia’s pet little scream acquires a considerable augmentation
of reality from this surprise, and the house is quickly in commotion.
Servants tear up and down stairs, bells are violently rung, doctors are
sent for, and Lady Dedlock is sought in all directions, but not found.
Nobody has seen or heard her since she last rang her bell. Her letter
to Sir Leicester is discovered on her table, but it is doubtful yet whether
he has not received another missive from another world requiring to
be personally answered, and all the living languages, and all the dead,
are as one to him.
They lay him down upon his bed, and chafe, and rub, and fan,
and put ice to his head, and try every means of restoration. Howbeit,
the day has ebbed away, and it is night in his room before his stertor-
ous breathing lulls or his fixed eyes show any consciousness of the
candle that is occasionally passed before them. But when this change
begins, it goes on; and by and by he nods or moves his eyes or even
his hand in token that he hears and comprehends.
He fell down, this morning, a handsome stately gentleman, some-
what infirm, but of a fine presence, and with a well-filled face. He
lies upon his bed, an aged man with sunken cheeks, the decrepit
shadow of himself. His voice was rich and mellow and he had so
long been thoroughly persuaded of the weight and import to man-
kind of any word he said that his words really had come to sound as if
there were something in them. But now he can only whisper, and what
he whispers sounds like what it is—mere jumble and jargon.
His favourite and faithful housekeeper stands at his bedside. It is
the first act he notices, and he clearly derives pleasure from it. After
vainly trying to make himself understood in speech, he makes signs
for a pencil. So inexpressively that they cannot at first understand
him; it is his old housekeeper who makes out what he wants and
brings in a slate.
After pausing for some time, he slowly scrawls upon it in a hand
that is not his, “Chesney Wold?”
No, she tells him; he is in London. He was taken ill in the
library this morning. Right thankful she is that she happened to come
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credit.”
Leicester puts her letter in his hands and looks intently in his face
while he reads it. A new intelligence comes into Mr. Bucket’s eye as
he reads on; with one hook of his finger, while that eye is still glanc-
ing over the words, he indicates, “Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, I
understand you.”
Sir Leicester writes upon the slate. “Full forgiveness. Find—” Mr. Bucket
stops his hand.
“Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, I’ll find her. But my search
after her must be begun out of hand. Not a minute must be lost.”
With the quickness of thought, he follows Sir Leicester Dedlock’s
look towards a little box upon a table.
“Bring it here, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet? Certainly. Open it
with one of these here keys? Certainly. The littlest key? to be sure.
Take the notes out? So I will. Count ‘em? That’s soon done. Twenty
and thirty’s fifty, and twenty’s seventy, and fifty’s one twenty, and
forty’s one sixty. Take ‘em for expenses? That I’ll do, and render an
account of course. Don’t spare money? No I won’t.”
The velocity and certainty of Mr. Bucket’s interpretation on all these
heads is little short of miraculous. Mrs. Rouncewell, who holds the
light, is giddy with the swiftness of his eyes and hands as he starts up,
furnished for his journey.
“You’re George’s mother, old lady; that’s about what you are, I
believe?” says Mr. Bucket aside, with his hat already on and button-
ing his coat.
“Yes, sir, I am his distressed mother.”
“So I thought, according to what he mentioned to me just now.
Well, then, I’ll tell you something. You needn’t be distressed no more.
Your son’s all right. Now, don’t you begin a-crying, because what
you’ve got to do is to take care of Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, and
you won’t do that by crying. As to your son, he’s all right, I tell you;
and he sends his loving duty, and hoping you’re the same. He’s dis-
charged honourable; that’s about what he is; with no more imputa-
tion on his character than there is on yours, and yours is a tidy one,
I’ll bet a pound. You may trust me, for I took your son. He con-
ducted himself in a game way, too, on that occasion; and he’s a fine-
made man, and you’re a fine-made old lady, and you’re a mother and
son, the pair of you, as might be showed for models in a caravan. Sir
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upon the lock. “I’ve had the pleasure of seeing you before. Inspector
Bucket. Look at that handkerchief, sir, Miss Esther Summerson’s.
Found it myself put away in a drawer of Lady Dedlock’s, quarter of
an hour ago. Not a moment to lose. Matter of life or death. You
know Lady Dedlock?”
“Yes.”
“There has been a discovery there to-day. Family affairs have come
out. Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, has had a fit—apoplexy or pa-
ralysis—and couldn’t be brought to, and precious time has been lost.
Lady Dedlock disappeared this afternoon and left a letter for him
that looks bad. Run your eye over it. Here it is!”
Mr. Jarndyce, having read it, asks him what he thinks.
“I don’t know. It looks like suicide. Anyways, there’s more and
more danger, every minute, of its drawing to that. I’d give a hundred
pound an hour to have got the start of the present time. Now, Mr.
Jarndyce, I am employed by Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, to fol-
low her and find her, to save her and take her his forgiveness. I have
money and full power, but I want something else. I want Miss
Summerson.”
Mr. Jarndyce in a troubled voice repeats, “Miss Summerson?”
“Now, Mr. Jarndyce”—Mr. Bucket has read his face with the great-
est attention all along—”I speak to you as a gentleman of a humane
heart, and under such pressing circumstances as don’t often happen. If
ever delay was dangerous, it’s dangerous now; and if ever you couldn’t
afterwards forgive yourself for causing it, this is the time. Eight or ten
hours, worth, as I tell you, a hundred pound apiece at least, have been
lost since Lady Dedlock disappeared. I am charged to find her. I am
Inspector Bucket. Besides all the rest that’s heavy on her, she has upon
her, as she believes, suspicion of murder. If I follow her alone, she,
being in ignorance of what Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, has com-
municated to me, may be driven to desperation. But if I follow her in
company with a young lady, answering to the description of a young
lady that she has a tenderness for—I ask no question, and I say no
more than that—she will give me credit for being friendly. Let me
come up with her and be able to have the hold upon her of putting
that young lady for’ard, and I’ll save her and prevail with her if she is
alive. Let me come up with her alone—a hard matter—and I’ll do my
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best, but I don’t answer for what the best may be. Time flies; it’s get-
ting on for one o’clock. When one strikes, there’s another hour gone,
and it’s worth a thousand pound now instead of a hundred.”
This is all true, and the pressing nature of the case cannot be ques-
tioned. Mr. Jarndyce begs him to remain there while he speaks to
Miss Summerson. Mr. Bucket says he will, but acting on his usual
principle, does no such thing, following upstairs instead and keeping
his man in sight. So he remains, dodging and lurking about in the
gloom of the staircase while they confer. In a very little time Mr.
Jarndyce comes down and tells him that Miss Summerson will join
him directly and place herself under his protection to accompany
him where he pleases. Mr. Bucket, satisfied, expresses high approval
and awaits her coming at the door.
There he mounts a high tower in his mind and looks out far and
wide. Many solitary figures he perceives creeping through the streets;
many solitary figures out on heaths, and roads, and lying under hay-
stacks. But the figure that he seeks is not among them. Other solitar-
ies he perceives, in nooks of bridges, looking over; and in shadowed
places down by the river’s level; and a dark, dark, shapeless object
drifting with the tide, more solitary than all, clings with a drowning
hold on his attention.
Where is she? Living or dead, where is she? If, as he folds the hand-
kerchief and carefully puts it up, it were able with an enchanted power
to bring before him the place where she found it and the night-
landscape near the cottage where it covered the little child, would he
descry her there? On the waste where the brick-kilns are burning
with a pale blue flare, where the straw-roofs of the wretched huts in
which the bricks are made are being scattered by the wind, where the
clay and water are hard frozen and the mill in which the gaunt blind
horse goes round all day looks like an instrument of human tor-
ture—traversing this deserted, blighted spot there is a lonely figure
with the sad world to itself, pelted by the snow and driven by the
wind, and cast out, it would seem, from all companionship. It is the
figure of a woman, too; but it is miserably dressed, and no such
clothes ever came through the hall and out at the great door of the
Dedlock mansion.
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CHAPTER LVII
Esther’s Narrative
I HAD GONE TO BED and fallen asleep when my guardian knocked at the
door of my room and begged me to get up directly. On my hurrying
to speak to him and learn what had happened, he told me, after a word
or two of preparation, that there had been a discovery at Sir Leicester
Dedlock’s. That my mother had fled, that a person was now at our
door who was empowered to convey to her the fullest assurances of
affectionate protection and forgiveness if he could possibly find her,
and that I was sought for to accompany him in the hope that my
entreaties might prevail upon her if his failed. Something to this gen-
eral purpose I made out, but I was thrown into such a tumult of alarm,
and hurry and distress, that in spite of every effort I could make to
subdue my agitation, I did not seem, to myself, fully to recover my
right mind until hours had passed.
But I dressed and wrapped up expeditiously without waking Char-
ley or any one and went down to Mr. Bucket, who was the person
entrusted with the secret. In taking me to him my guardian told me
this, and also explained how it was that he had come to think of me.
Mr. Bucket, in a low voice, by the light of my guardian’s candle, read
to me in the hall a letter that my mother had left upon her table; and
I suppose within ten minutes of my having been aroused I was sit-
ting beside him, rolling swiftly through the streets.
His manner was very keen, and yet considerate when he explained
to me that a great deal might depend on my being able to answer,
without confusion, a few questions that he wished to ask me. These
were, chiefly, whether I had had much communication with my
mother (to whom he only referred as Lady Dedlock), when and where
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I had spoken with her last, and how she had become possessed of my
handkerchief. When I had satisfied him on these points, he asked me
particularly to consider—taking time to think—whether within my
knowledge there was any one, no matter where, in whom she might
be at all likely to confide under circumstances of the last necessity. I
could think of no one but my guardian. But by and by I mentioned
Mr. Boythorn. He came into my mind as connected with his old
chivalrous manner of mentioning my mother’s name and with what
my guardian had informed me of his engagement to her sister and
his unconscious connexion with her unhappy story.
My companion had stopped the driver while we held this
conversation, that we might the better hear each other. He now told
him to go on again and said to me, after considering within himself for
a few moments, that he had made up his mind how to proceed. He
was quite willing to tell me what his plan was, but I did not feel clear
enough to understand it.
We had not driven very far from our lodgings when we stopped in
a by-street at a public-looking place lighted up with gas. Mr. Bucket
took me in and sat me in an armchair by a bright fire. It was now
past one, as I saw by the clock against the wall. Two police officers,
looking in their perfectly neat uniform not at all like people who
were up all night, were quietly writing at a desk; and the place seemed
very quiet altogether, except for some beating and calling out at dis-
tant doors underground, to which nobody paid any attention.
A third man in uniform, whom Mr. Bucket called and to whom
he whispered his instructions, went out; and then the two others
advised together while one wrote from Mr. Bucket’s subdued dicta-
tion. It was a description of my mother that they were busy with, for
Mr. Bucket brought it to me when it was done and read it in a
whisper. It was very accurate indeed.
The second officer, who had attended to it closely, then copied it
out and called in another man in uniform (there were several in an
outer room), who took it up and went away with it. All this was
done with the greatest dispatch and without the waste of a moment;
yet nobody was at all hurried. As soon as the paper was sent out upon
its travels, the two officers resumed their former quiet work of writ-
ing with neatness and care. Mr. Bucket thoughtfully came and warmed
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the soles of his boots, first one and then the other, at the fire.
“Are you well wrapped up, Miss Summerson?” he asked me as his
eyes met mine. “It’s a desperate sharp night for a young lady to be
out in.”
I told him I cared for no weather and was warmly clothed.
“It may be a long job,” he observed; “but so that it ends well, never
mind, miss.”
“I pray to heaven it may end well!” said I.
He nodded comfortingly. “You see, whatever you do, don’t you go
and fret yourself. You keep yourself cool and equal for anything that may
happen, and it’ll be the better for you, the better for me, the better for
Lady Dedlock, and the better for Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet.”
He was really very kind and gentle, and as he stood before the fire
warming his boots and rubbing his face with his forefinger, I felt a
confidence in his sagacity which reassured me. It was not yet a quar-
ter to two when I heard horses’ feet and wheels outside. “Now, Miss
Summerson,” said he, “we are off, if you please!”
He gave me his arm, and the two officers courteously bowed me
out, and we found at the door a phaeton or barouche with a postilion
and post horses. Mr. Bucket handed me in and took his own seat on
the box. The man in uniform whom he had sent to fetch this equi-
page then handed him up a dark lantern at his request, and when he
had given a few directions to the driver, we rattled away.
I was far from sure that I was not in a dream. We rattled with great
rapidity through such a labyrinth of streets that I soon lost all idea
where we were, except that we had crossed and re-crossed the river,
and still seemed to be traversing a low-lying, waterside, dense
neighbourhood of narrow thoroughfares chequered by docks and
basins, high piles of warehouses, swing-bridges, and masts of ships.
At length we stopped at the corner of a little slimy turning, which
the wind from the river, rushing up it, did not purify; and I saw my
companion, by the light of his lantern, in conference with several
men who looked like a mixture of police and sailors. Against the
mouldering wall by which they stood, there was a bill, on which I
could discern the words, “Found Drowned”; and this and an inscrip-
tion about drags possessed me with the awful suspicion shadowed
forth in our visit to that place.
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Lady Dedlock quiet. He had been making his tongue more free than
welcome as to a small accidental service he had been paid for by the
deceased Mr. Tulkinghorn; and it wouldn’t do, at any sort of price,
to have him playing those games. So having warned him out of Lon-
don, I made an afternoon of it to warn him to keep out of it now he
WAS away, and go farther from it, and maintain a bright look-out
that I didn’t catch him coming back again.”
“Poor creature!” said I.
“Poor enough,” assented Mr. Bucket, “and trouble enough, and
well enough away from London, or anywhere else. I was regularly
turned on my back when I found him taken up by your establish-
ment, I do assure you.
I asked him why. “Why, my dear?” said Mr. Bucket. “Naturally
there was no end to his tongue then. He might as well have been
born with a yard and a half of it, and a remnant over.”
Although I remember this conversation now, my head was in con-
fusion at the time, and my power of attention hardly did more than
enable me to understand that he entered into these particulars to
divert me. With the same kind intention, manifestly, he often spoke
to me of indifferent things, while his face was busy with the one
object that we had in view. He still pursued this subject as we turned
in at the garden-gate.
“Ah!” said Mr. Bucket. “Here we are, and a nice retired place it is.
Puts a man in mind of the country house in the Woodpecker-tap-
ping, that was known by the smoke which so gracefully curled. They’re
early with the kitchen fire, and that denotes good servants. But what you’ve
always got to be careful of with servants is who comes to see ‘em; you never
know what they’re up to if you don’t know that. And another thing, my
dear. Whenever you find a young man behind the kitchen-door, you give
that young man in charge on suspicion of being secreted in a dwelling-
house with an unlawful purpose.”
We were now in front of the house; he looked attentively and
closely at the gravel for footprints before he raised his eyes to the
windows.
“Do you generally put that elderly young gentleman in the same
room when he’s on a visit here, Miss Summerson?” he inquired,
glancing at Mr. Skimpole’s usual chamber.
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There were only three of them sitting at breakfast, the child lying
asleep on a bed in the corner. It was Jenny, the mother of the dead
child, who was absent. The other woman rose on seeing me; and the
men, though they were, as usual, sulky and silent, each gave me a
morose nod of recognition. A look passed between them when Mr.
Bucket followed me in, and I was surprised to see that the woman
evidently knew him.
I had asked leave to enter of course. Liz (the only name by which
I knew her) rose to give me her own chair, but I sat down on a stool
near the fire, and Mr. Bucket took a corner of the bedstead. Now
that I had to speak and was among people with whom I was not
familiar, I became conscious of being hurried and giddy. It was very
difficult to begin, and I could not help bursting into tears.
“Liz,” said I, “I have come a long way in the night and through the
snow to inquire after a lady—”
“Who has been here, you know,” Mr. Bucket struck in, addressing
the whole group with a composed propitiatory face; “that’s the lady
the young lady means. The lady that was here last night, you know.”
“And who told you as there was anybody here?” inquired Jenny’s
husband, who had made a surly stop in his eating to listen and now
measured him with his eye.
“A person of the name of Michael Jackson, with a blue welveteen
waistcoat with a double row of mother of pearl buttons,” Mr. Bucket
immediately answered.
“He had as good mind his own business, whoever he is,” growled
the man.
“He’s out of employment, I believe,” said Mr. Bucket apologeti-
cally for Michael Jackson, “and so gets talking.”
The woman had not resumed her chair, but stood faltering with
her hand upon its broken back, looking at me. I thought she would
have spoken to me privately if she had dared. She was still in this
attitude of uncertainty when her husband, who was eating with a
lump of bread and fat in one hand and his clasp-knife in the other,
struck the handle of his knife violently on the table and told her with
an oath to mind her own business at any rate and sit down.
“I should like to have seen Jenny very much,” said I, “for I am sure
she would have told me all she could about this lady, whom I am very
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seen. I sometimes feared we had missed the way and got into the
ploughed grounds or the marshes. If I ever thought of the time I had
been out, it presented itself as an indefinite period of great duration,
and I seemed, in a strange way, never to have been free from the
anxiety under which I then laboured.
As we advanced, I began to feel misgivings that my companion
lost confidence. He was the same as before with all the roadside
people, but he looked graver when he sat by himself on the box. I
saw his finger uneasily going across and across his mouth during the
whole of one long weary stage. I overheard that he began to ask the
drivers of coaches and other vehicles coming towards us what passen-
gers they had seen in other coaches and vehicles that were in advance.
Their replies did not encourage him. He always gave me a reassuring
beck of his finger and lift of his eyelid as he got upon the box again,
but he seemed perplexed now when he
said, “Get on, my lad!”
At last, when we were changing, he told me that he had lost the
track of the dress so long that he began to be surprised. It was noth-
ing, he said, to lose such a track for one while, and to take it up for
another while, and so on; but it had disappeared here in an unac-
countable manner, and we had not come upon it since. This cor-
roborated the apprehensions I had formed, when he began to look at
direction-posts, and to leave the carriage at cross roads for a quarter
of an hour at a time while he explored them. But I was not to be
down-hearted, he told me, for it was as likely as not that
the next stage might set us right again.
The next stage, however, ended as that one ended; we had no new
clue. There was a spacious inn here, solitary, but a comfortable sub-
stantial building, and as we drove in under a large gateway before I
knew it, where a landlady and her pretty daughters came to the car-
riage-door, entreating me to alight and refresh myself while the horses
were making ready, I thought it would be uncharitable to refuse.
They took me upstairs to a warm room and left me there.
It was at the corner of the house, I remember, looking two ways.
On one side to a stable-yard open to a by-road, where the ostlers
were unharnessing the splashed and tired horses from the muddy
carriage, and beyond that to the by-road itself, across which the sign
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alive here with them horses. Send a man for’ard in the saddle to the
next stage, and let him send another for’ard again, and order four on,
up, right through. My darling, don’t you be afraid!”
These orders and the way in which he ran about the yard urging
them caused a general excitement that was scarcely less bewildering
to me than the sudden change. But in the height of the confusion, a
mounted man galloped away to order the relays, and our horses were
put to with great speed.
“My dear,” said Mr. Bucket, jumping to his seat and looking in
again, “—you’ll excuse me if I’m too familiar—don’t you fret and
worry yourself no more than you can help. I say nothing else at
present; but you know me, my dear; now, don’t you?”
I endeavoured to say that I knew he was far more capable than I of
deciding what we ought to do, but was he sure that this was right?
Could I not go forward by myself in search of—I grasped his hand
again in my distress and whispered it to him—of my own mother.
“My dear,” he answered, “I know, I know, and would I put
you wrong, do you think? Inspector Bucket. Now you know
me, don’t you?”
What could I say but yes!
“Then you keep up as good a heart as you can, and you rely upon
me for standing by you, no less than by Sir Leicester Dedlock, Bar-
onet. Now, are you right there?”
“All right, sir!”
“Off she goes, then. And get on, my lads!”
We were again upon the melancholy road by which we had come,
tearing up the miry sleet and thawing snow as if they were torn up by
a waterwheel.
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CHAPTER LVIII
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eye, Mr. Jones, and you have the flock.” So, likewise, Sheen and
Gloss to their Jones, in reference to knowing where to have the fash-
ionable people and how to bring what they (Sheen and Gloss) choose
into fashion. On similar unerring principles, Mr. Sladdery the librar-
ian, and indeed the great farmer of gorgeous sheep, admits this very
day, “Why yes, sir, there certainly are reports concerning Lady Dedlock,
very current indeed among my high connexion, sir. You see, my high
connexion must talk about something, sir; and it’s only to get a subject
into vogue with one or two ladies I could name to make it go down
with the whole. Just what I should have done with those ladies, sir, in the
case of any novelty you had left to me to bring in, they have done of
themselves in this case through knowing Lady
Dedlock and being perhaps a little innocently jealous of her too, sir.
You’ll find, sir, that this topic will be very popular among my high
connexion. If it had been a speculation, sir, it would have brought money.
And when I say so, you may trust to my being right, sir, for I have made
it my business to study my high connexion and to be able to wind it up
like a clock, sir.”
Thus rumour thrives in the capital, and will not go down into
Lincolnshire. By half-past five, post meridian, Horse Guards’ time, it
has even elicited a new remark from the Honourable Mr. Stables, which
bids fair to outshine the old one, on which he has so long rested his
colloquial reputation. This sparkling sally is to the effect that although
he always knew she was the best-groomed woman in the stud, he had
no idea she was a bolter. It is immensely received in turf-circles.
At feasts and festivals also, in firmaments she has often graced, and
among constellations she outshone but yesterday, she is still the preva-
lent subject. What is it? Who is it? When was it? Where was it? How
was it? She is discussed by her dear friends with all the genteelest slang
in vogue, with the last new word, the last new manner, the last new
drawl, and the perfection of polite indifference. A remarkable feature
of the theme is that it is found to be so inspiring that several people
come out upon it who never came out before—positively say things!
William Buffy carries one of these smartnesses from the place where he
dines down to the House, where the Whip for his party hands it about
with his snuff-box to keep men together who want to be off, with
such effect that the Speaker (who has had it privately insinuated into
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his own ear under the corner of his wig) cries, “Order at the bar!” three
times without making an impression.
And not the least amazing circumstance connected with her being
vaguely the town talk is that people hovering on the confines of Mr.
Sladdery’s high connexion, people who know nothing and ever did
know nothing about her, think it essential to their reputation to
pretend that she is their topic too, and to retail her at second-hand
with the last new word and the last new manner, and the last new
drawl, and the last new polite indifference, and all the rest of it, all at
second-hand but considered equal to new in inferior systems and to
fainter stars. If there be any man of letters, art,
or science among these little dealers, how noble in him to support
the feeble sisters on such majestic crutches!
So goes the wintry day outside the Dedlock mansion. How within it?
Sir Leicester, lying in his bed, can speak a little, though with difficulty
and indistinctness. He is enjoined to silence and to rest, and they have
given him some opiate to lull his pain, for his old enemy is very hard
with him. He is never asleep, though sometimes he seems to fall into a
dull waking doze. He caused his bedstead to be moved out nearer to the
window when he heard it was such inclement weather, and his head to
be so adjusted that he could see the driving snow and sleet. He watches it
as it falls, throughout the whole wintry day.
Upon the least noise in the house, which is kept hushed, his hand
is at the pencil. The old housekeeper, sitting by him, knows what he
would write and whispers, “No, he has not come back yet, Sir Le-
icester. It was late last night when he went. He has been but a little
time gone yet.”
He withdraws his hand and falls to looking at the sleet and snow
again until they seem, by being long looked at, to fall so thick and
fast that he is obliged to close his eyes for a minute on the giddy
whirl of white flakes and icy blots.
He began to look at them as soon as it was light. The day is not yet
far spent when he conceives it to be necessary that her rooms should
be prepared for her. It is very cold and wet. Let there be good fires.
Let them know that she is expected. Please see to it yourself. He
writes to this purpose on his slate, and Mrs. Rouncewell with a heavy
heart obeys.
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“For I dread, George,” the old lady says to her son, who waits below to
keep her company when she has a little leisure, “I dread, my dear, that my
Lady will never more set foot within these walls.”
“That’s a bad presentiment, mother.”
“Nor yet within the walls of Chesney Wold, my dear.”
“That’s worse. But why, mother?”
“When I saw my Lady yesterday, George, she looked to me—and
I may say at me too—as if the step on the Ghost’s Walk had almost
walked her down.”
“Come, come! You alarm yourself with old-story fears, mother.”
“No I don’t, my dear. No I don’t. It’s going on for sixty year that I
have been in this family, and I never had any fears for it before. But it’s
breaking up, my dear; the great old Dedlock family is breaking up.”
“I hope not, mother.”
“I am thankful I have lived long enough to be with Sir Leicester in
this illness and trouble, for I know I am not too old nor too useless
to be a welcomer sight to him than anybody else in my place would
be. But the step on the Ghost’s Walk will walk my Lady down,
George; it has been many a day behind her, and now it will pass her
and go on.”
“Well, mother dear, I say again, I hope not.”
“Ah, so do I, George,” the old lady returns, shaking her head and
parting her folded hands. “But if my fears come true, and he has to
know it, who will tell him!”
“Are these her rooms?”
“These are my Lady’s rooms, just as she left them.”
“Why, now,” says the trooper, glancing round him and speaking in a
lower voice, “I begin to understand how you come to think as you do
think, mother. Rooms get an awful look about them when they are
fitted up, like these, for one person you are used to see in them, and that
person is away under any shadow, let alone being God knows where.”
He is not far out. As all partings foreshadow the great final one,
so, empty rooms, bereft of a familiar presence, mournfully whisper
what your room and what mine must one day be. My Lady’s state
has a hollow look, thus gloomy and abandoned; and in the inner
apartment, where Mr. Bucket last night made his secret perquisition,
the traces of her dresses and her ornaments, even the mirrors accus-
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will not be long—I should still hope for the favour of being al-
lowed to remain unknown in general. That involves explanations
not very hard to be guessed at, not very well timed here, and not
very creditable to myself. However opinions may differ on a vari-
ety of subjects, I should think it would be universally agreed, Sir
Leicester, that I am not much to boast of.”
“You have been a soldier,” observes Sir Leicester, “and a faithful one.”
George makes his military how. “As far as that goes, Sir Leicester, I
have done my duty under discipline, and it was the least I could do.”
“You find me,” says Sir Leicester, whose eyes are much attracted
towards him, “far from well, George Rouncewell.”
“I am very sorry both to hear it and to see it, Sir Leicester.”
“I am sure you are. No. In addition to my older malady, I have had
a sudden and bad attack. Something that deadens,” making an endeav-
our to pass one hand down one side, “and confuses,” touching his lips.
George, with a look of assent and sympathy, makes another bow.
The different times when they were both young men (the trooper
much the younger of the two) and looked at one another down at
Chesney Wold arise before them both and soften both.
Sir Leicester, evidently with a great determination to say, in his own
manner, something that is on his mind before relapsing into silence,
tries to raise himself among his pillows a little more. George, obser-
vant of the action, takes him in his arms again and places him as he
desires to be. “Thank you, George. You are another self to me. You
have often carried my spare gun at Chesney Wold, George. You are
familiar to me in these strange circumstances, very familiar.” He has
put Sir Leicester’s sounder arm over his shoulder in lifting him up, and
Sir Leicester is slow in drawing it away again as he says these words.
“I was about to add,” he presently goes on, “I was about to add,
respecting this attack, that it was unfortunately simultaneous with a
slight misunderstanding between my Lady and myself. I do not mean
that there was any difference between us (for there has been none),
but that there was a misunderstanding of certain circumstances im-
portant only to ourselves, which deprives me, for a little while, of
my Lady’s society. She has found it necessary to make a journey—I
trust will shortly return. Volumnia, do I make myself intelligible?
The words are not quite under my command in the manner of pro-
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nouncing them.”
Volumnia understands him perfectly, and in truth be delivers him-
self with far greater plainness than could have been supposed possible
a minute ago. The effort by which he does so is written in the anx-
ious and labouring expression of his face. Nothing but the strength
of his purpose enables him to make it.
“Therefore, Volumnia, I desire to say in your presence—and in the
presence of my old retainer and friend, Mrs. Rouncewell, whose truth
and fidelity no one can question, and in the presence of her son George,
who comes back like a familiar recollection of my youth in the home
of my ancestors at Chesney Wold—in case I should relapse, in case I
should not recover, in case I should lose both my speech and the
power of writing, though I hope for better things—”
The old housekeeper weeping silently; Volumnia in the greatest
agitation, with the freshest bloom on her cheeks; the trooper with
his arms folded and his head a little bent, respectfully attentive.
“Therefore I desire to say, and to call you all to witness—beginning,
Volumnia, with yourself, most solemnly—that I am on unaltered terms
with Lady Dedlock. That I assert no cause whatever of complaint against
her. That I have ever had the strongest affection for her, and that I
retain it undiminished. Say this to herself, and to every one. If you ever
say less than this, you will be guilty of deliberate falsehood to me.”
Volumnia tremblingly protests that she will observe his injunc-
tions to the letter.
“My Lady is too high in position, too handsome, too accomplished,
too superior in most respects to the best of those by whom she is
surrounded, not to have her enemies and traducers, I dare say. Let it
be known to them, as I make it known to you, that being of sound
mind, memory, and understanding, I revoke no disposition I have
made in her favour. I abridge nothing I have ever bestowed upon her.
I am on unaltered terms with her, and I recall—having the full power
to do it if I were so disposed, as you see—no act I have done for her
advantage and happiness.”
His formal array of words might have at any other time, as it has
often had, something ludicrous in it, but at this time it is serious and
affecting. His noble earnestness, his fidelity, his gallant shielding of
her, his generous conquest of his own wrong and his own pride for
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her sake, are simply honourable, manly, and true. Nothing less wor-
thy can be seen through the lustre of such qualities in the common-
est mechanic, nothing less worthy can be seen in the best-born gentle-
man. In such a light both aspire alike, both rise alike, both children
of the dust shine equally.
Overpowered by his exertions, he lays his head back on his pillows
and closes his eyes for not more than a minute, when he again re-
sumes his watching of the weather and his attention to the muffled
sounds. In the rendering of those little services, and in the manner of
their acceptance, the trooper has become installed as necessary to him.
Nothing has been said, but it is quite understood. He falls a step or
two backward to be out of sight and mounts guard a little behind his
mother’s chair.
The day is now beginning to decline. The mist and the sleet into
which the snow has all resolved itself are darker, and the blaze begins
to tell more vividly upon the room walls and furniture. The gloom
augments; the bright gas springs up in the streets; and the pertina-
cious oil lamps which yet hold their ground there, with their source
of life half frozen and half thawed, twinkle gaspingly like fiery fish
out of water—as they are. The world, which has been rumbling over
the straw and pulling at the bell, “to inquire,” begins to go home,
begins to dress, to dine, to discuss its dear friend with all the last new
modes, as already mentioned.
Now does Sir Leicester become worse, restless, uneasy, and in great
pain. Volumnia, lighting a candle (with a predestined aptitude for do-
ing something objectionable), is bidden to put it out again, for it is not
yet dark enough. Yet it is very dark too, as dark as it will be all night.
By and by she tries again. No! Put it out. It is not dark enough yet.
His old housekeeper is the first to understand that he is striving to
uphold the fiction with himself that it is not growing late.
“Dear Sir Leicester, my honoured master,” she softly whispers, “I
must, for your own good, and my duty, take the freedom of begging
and praying that you will not lie here in the lone darkness watching
and waiting and dragging through the time. Let me draw the cur-
tains, and light the candles, and make things more comfortable about
you. The church-clocks will strike the hours just the same, Sir Le-
icester, and the night will pass away just the same. My Lady will
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second turning past the end of the carving and gilding, a cousinly
room containing a fearful abortion of a portrait of Sir Leicester ban-
ished for its crimes, and commanding in the day a solemn yard planted
with dried-up shrubs like antediluvian specimens of black tea—is a
prey to horrors of many kinds. Not last nor least among them, pos-
sibly, is a horror of what may befall her little income in the event, as
she expresses it, “of anything happening” to Sir Leicester. Anything,
in this sense, meaning one thing only; and that the last thing that can
happen to the consciousness of any baronet in the known world.
An effect of these horrors is that Volumnia finds she cannot go to
bed in her own room or sit by the fire in her own room, but must
come forth with her fair head tied up in a profusion of shawl, and
her fair form enrobed in drapery, and parade the mansion like a ghost,
particularly haunting the rooms, warm and luxurious, prepared for
one who still does not return. Solitude under such circumstances
being not to be thought of, Volumnia is attended by her maid, who,
impressed from her own bed for that purpose, extremely cold, very
sleepy, and generally an injured maid as condemned by circumstances
to take office with a cousin, when she had resolved to be maid to
nothing less than ten thousand a year,
has not a sweet expression of countenance.
The periodical visits of the trooper to these rooms, however, in the
course of his patrolling is an assurance of protection and company
both to mistress and maid, which renders them very acceptable in the
small hours of the night. Whenever he is heard advancing, they both
make some little decorative preparation to receive him; at other times
they divide their watches into short scraps of oblivion and dialogues
not wholly free from acerbity, as to whether Miss Dedlock, sitting
with her feet upon the fender, was or was not falling into the fire when
rescued (to her great displeasure) by her guardian genius the maid.
“How is Sir Leicester now, Mr. George?” inquires Volumnia, ad-
justing her cowl over her head.
“Why, Sir Leicester is much the same, miss. He is very low and ill,
and he even wanders a little sometimes.”
“Has he asked for me?” inquires Volumnia tenderly.
“Why, no, I can’t say he has, miss. Not within my hearing, that is
to say.”
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CHAPTER LIX
Esther’s Narrative
IT WAS THREE O’CLOCK in the morning when the houses outside Lon-
don did at last begin to exclude the country and to close us in with
streets. We had made our way along roads in a far worse condition
than when we had traversed them by daylight, both the fall and the
thaw having lasted ever since; but the energy of my companion never
slackened. It had only been, as I thought, of less assistance than the
horses in getting us on, and it had often aided them. They had stopped
exhausted halfway up hills, they had been driven through streams of
turbulent water, they had slipped down and become entangled with
the harness; but he and his little lantern had been always ready, and
when the mishap was set right, I had never heard any variation in his
cool, “Get on, my lads!”
The steadiness and confidence with which he had directed our
journey back I could not account for. Never wavering, he never even
stopped to make an inquiry until we were within a few miles of
London. A very few words, here and there, were then enough for
him; and thus we came, at between three and four o’clock in the
morning, into Islington.
I will not dwell on the suspense and anxiety with which I reflected
all this time that we were leaving my mother farther and farther
behind every minute. I think I had some strong hope that he must be
right and could not fail to have a satisfactory object in following this
woman, but I tormented myself with questioning it and discussing
it during the whole journey. What was to ensue when we found her
and what could compensate us for this loss of time were questions
also that I could not possibly dismiss; my mind was quite tortured
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box, and we once more drove away. Where we drove I neither knew
then nor have ever known since, but we appeared to seek out the
narrowest and worst streets in London. Whenever I saw him direct-
ing the driver, I was prepared for our descending into a deeper com-
plication of such streets, and we never failed to do so.
Sometimes we emerged upon a wider thoroughfare or came to a
larger building than the generality, well lighted. Then we stopped at
offices like those we had visited when we began our journey, and I
saw him in consultation with others. Sometimes he would get down
by an archway or at a street corner and mysteriously show the light of
his little lantern. This would attract similar lights from various dark
quarters, like so many insects, and a fresh consultation would be
held. By degrees we appeared to contract our search within narrower
and easier limits. Single police-officers on duty could now tell Mr.
Bucket what he wanted to know and point to him where to go. At
last we stopped for a rather long conversation between him and one
of these men, which I supposed to be satisfactory from his manner
of nodding from time to time. When it was finished he came to me
looking very busy and very attentive.
“Now, Miss Summerson, he said to me, “you won’t be alarmed
whatever comes off, I know. It’s not necessary for me to give you any
further caution than to tell you that we have marked this person down
and that you may be of use to me before I know it myself. I don’t like
to ask such a thing, my dear, but would you walk a little way?”
Of course I got out directly and took his arm.
“It ain’t so easy to keep your feet,” said Mr. Bucket, “but take
time.”
Although I looked about me confusedly and hurriedly as we crossed
the street, I thought I knew the place. “Are we in Holborn?” I asked him.
“Yes,” said Mr. Bucket. “Do you know this turning?”
“It looks like Chancery Lane.”
“And was christened so, my dear,” said Mr. Bucket.
We turned down it, and as we went shuffling through the sleet, I
heard the clocks strike half-past five. We passed on in silence and as
quickly as we could with such a foothold, when some one coming
towards us on the narrow pavement, wrapped in a cloak, stopped
and stood aside to give me room. In the same moment I heard an
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all this from his promise to me? How thankless I must have been if
it had not recalled the words he said to me when he was so moved by
the change in my appearance: “I will accept him as a trust, and it shall
be a sacred one!”
We now turned into another narrow street. “Mr. Woodcourt,” said
Mr. Bucket, who had eyed him closely as we came along, “our business
takes us to a law-stationer’s here, a certain Mr. Snagsby’s. What, you
know him, do you?” He was so quick that he saw it in an instant.
“Yes, I know a little of him and have called upon him at this place.”
“Indeed, sir?” said Mr. Bucket. “Then you will be so good as to let
me leave Miss Summerson with you for a moment while I go and
have half a word with him?”
The last police-officer with whom he had conferred was standing
silently behind us. I was not aware of it until he struck in on my
saying I heard some one crying.
“Don’t be alarmed, miss,” he returned. “It’s Snagsby’s servant.”
“Why, you see,” said Mr. Bucket, “the girl’s subject to fits, and has
‘em bad upon her to-night. A most contrary circumstance it is, for I
want certain information out of that girl, and she must be brought
to reason somehow.”
“At all events, they wouldn’t be up yet if it wasn’t for her, Mr. Bucket,”
said the other man. “She’s been at it pretty well all night, sir.”
“Well, that’s true,” he returned. “My light’s burnt out. Show yours
a moment.”
All this passed in a whisper a door or two from the house in which
I could faintly hear crying and moaning. In the little round of light
produced for the purpose, Mr. Bucket went up to the door and
knocked. The door was opened after he had knocked twice, and he
went in, leaving us standing in the street.
“Miss Summerson,” said Mr. Woodcourt, “if without obtruding
myself on your confidence I may remain near you, pray let me do so.”
“You are truly kind,” I answered. “I need wish to keep no secret of
my own from you; if I keep any, it is another’s.”
“I quite understand. Trust me, I will remain near you only so long
as I can fully respect it.”
“I trust implicitly to you,” I said. “I know and deeply feel how
sacredly you keep your promise.
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After a short time the little round of light shone out again, and
Mr. Bucket advanced towards us in it with his earnest face. “Please to
come in, Miss Summerson,” he said, “and sit down by the fire. Mr.
Woodcourt, from information I have received I understand you are a
medical man. Would you look to this girl and see if anything can be
done to bring her round. She has a letter somewhere that I particu-
larly want. It’s not in her box, and I think it must be about her; but
she is so twisted and clenched up that she is difficult to handle with-
out hurting.”
We all three went into the house together; although it was cold and
raw, it smelt close too from being up all night. In the passage behind
the door stood a scared, sorrowful-looking little man in a grey coat
who seemed to have a naturally polite manner and spoke meekly.
“Downstairs, if you please, Mr. Bucket,” said he. “The lady will
excuse the front kitchen; we use it as our workaday sitting-room.
The back is Guster’s bedroom, and in it she’s a-carrying on, poor
thing, to a frightful extent!”
We went downstairs, followed by Mr. Snagsby, as I soon found
the little man to be. In the front kitchen, sitting by the fire, was Mrs.
Snagsby, with very red eyes and a very severe expression of face.
“My little woman,” said Mr. Snagsby, entering behind us, “to wave—
not to put too fine a point upon it, my dear—hostilities for one single
moment in the course of this prolonged night, here is Inspector Bucket,
Mr. Woodcourt, and a lady.”
She looked very much astonished, as she had reason for doing, and
looked particularly hard at me.
“My little woman,” said Mr. Snagsby, sitting down in the remot-
est corner by the door, as if he were taking a liberty, “it is not unlikely
that you may inquire of me why Inspector Bucket, Mr. Woodcourt,
and a lady call upon us in Cook’s Court, Cursitor Street, at the present
hour. I don’t know. I have not the least idea. If I was to be informed,
I should despair of understanding, and I’d rather not be told.”
He appeared so miserable, sitting with his head upon his hand,
and I appeared so unwelcome, that I was going to offer an apology
when Mr. Bucket took the matter on himself.
“Now, Mr. Snagsby,” said he, “the best thing you can do is to go along
with Mr. Woodcourt to look after your Guster—”
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“My Guster, Mr. Bucket!” cried Mr. Snagsby. “Go on, sir, go on.
I shall be charged with that next.”
“And to hold the candle,” pursued Mr. Bucket without correcting
himself, “or hold her, or make yourself useful in any way you’re asked.
Which there’s not a man alive more ready to do, for you’re a man of
urbanity and suavity, you know, and you’ve got the sort of heart that
can feel for another. Mr. Woodcourt, would you be so good as see to
her, and if you can get that letter from her, to let me have it as soon
as ever you can?”
As they went out, Mr. Bucket made me sit down in a corner by
the fire and take off my wet shoes, which he turned up to dry upon
the fender, talking all the time.
“Don’t you be at all put out, miss, by the want of a hospitable
look from Mrs. Snagsby there, because she’s under a mistake alto-
gether. She’ll find that out sooner than will be agreeable to a lady of
her generally correct manner of forming her thoughts, because I’m a-
going to explain it to her.” Here, standing on the hearth with his wet
hat and shawls in his hand, himself a pile of wet, he turned to Mrs.
Snagsby. “Now, the first thing that I say to you, as a married woman
possessing what you may call charms, you know—’Believe Me, if
All Those Endearing,’ and cetrer—you’re well acquainted with the
song, because it’s in vain for you to tell me that you and good society
are strangers—charms—attractions, mind you, that ought to give
you confidence in yourself—is, that you’ve done it.”
Mrs. Snagsby looked rather alarmed, relented a little and faltered,
what did Mr. Bucket mean.
“What does Mr. Bucket mean?” he repeated, and I saw by his face
that all the time he talked he was listening for the discovery of the
letter, to my own great agitation, for I knew then how important it
must be; “I’ll tell you what he means, ma’am. Go and see Othello
acted. That’s the tragedy for you.”
Mrs. Snagsby consciously asked why.
“Why?” said Mr. Bucket. “Because you’ll come to that if you don’t
look out. Why, at the very moment while I speak, I know what your
mind’s not wholly free from respecting this young lady. But shall I
tell you who this young lady is? Now, come, you’re what I call an
intellectual woman—with your soul too large for your body, if you
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come to that, and chafing it—and you know me, and you recollect
where you saw me last, and what was talked of in that circle. Don’t
you? Yes! Very well. This young lady is that young lady.”
Mrs. Snagsby appeared to understand the reference better than I
did at the time.
“And Toughey—him as you call Jo—was mixed up in the same
business, and no other; and the law-writer that you know of was
mixed up in the same business, and no other; and your husband,
with no more knowledge of it than your great grandfather, was mixed
up (by Mr. Tulkinghorn, deceased, his best customer) in the same
business, and no other; and the whole bileing of people was mixed
up in the same business, and no other. And yet a married woman,
possessing your attractions, shuts her eyes (and sparklers too), and
goes and runs her delicate-formed head against a wall. Why, I am
ashamed of you! (I expected Mr. Woodcourt might have got it by
this time.)”
Mrs. Snagsby shook her head and put her handkerchief to her
eyes.
“Is that all?” said Mr. Bucket excitedly. “No. See what happens.
Another person mixed up in that business and no other, a person in a
wretched state, comes here to-night and is seen a-speaking to your
maid-servant; and between her and your maid-servant there passes a
paper that I would give a hundred pound for, down. What do you
do? You hide and you watch ‘em, and you pounce upon that maid-
servant—knowing what she’s subject to and what a little thing will
bring ‘em on—in that surprising manner and with that severity that,
by the Lord, she goes off and keeps off, when a life may be hanging
upon that girl’s words!”
He so thoroughly meant what he said now that I involuntarily
clasped my hands and felt the room turning away from me. But it
stopped. Mr. Woodcourt came in, put a paper into his hand, and
went away again.
“Now, Mrs, Snagsby, the only amends you can make,” said Mr.
Bucket, rapidly glancing at it, “is to let me speak a word to this
young lady in private here. And if you know of any help that you can
give to that gentleman in the next kitchen there or can think of any
one thing that’s likelier than another to bring the girl round, do your
swiftest and best!” In an instant she was gone, and he had shut the
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Dickens
“I came to the cottage with two objects. First, to see the dear one,
if I could, once more—but only to see her—not to speak to her or
let her know that I was near. The other object, to elude pursuit and
to be lost. Do not blame the mother for her share. The assistance
that she rendered me, she rendered on my strongest assurance that it
was for the dear one’s good. You remember her dead child. The men’s
consent I bought, but her help was freely given.”
“‘I came.’ That was written,” said my companion, “when she rested
there. It bears out what I made of it. I was right.”
“I have wandered a long distance, and for many hours, and I know
that I must soon die. These streets! I have no purpose but to die.
When I left, I had a worse, but I am saved from adding that guilt to
the rest. Cold, wet, and fatigue are sufficient causes for my being
found dead, but I shall die of others, though I suffer from these. It
was right that all that had sustained me should give way at once and
that I should die of terror and my conscience.
“Take courage,” said Mr. Bucket. “There’s only a few words more.”
Those, too, were written at another time. To all appearance, al-
most in the dark:
“I have done all I could do to be lost. I shall be soon forgotten so, and
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find it, and I said yes, and I told her; and she looked at me with eyes
like almost as if she was blind, and herself all waving back. And so
she took out the letter, and showed it me, and said if she was to put
that in the post-office, it would be rubbed out and not minded and
never sent; and would I take it from her, and send it, and the messen-
ger would be paid at the house. And so I said yes, if it was no harm,
and she said no—no harm. And so I took it from her, and she said
she had nothing to give me, and I said I was poor myself and conse-
quently wanted nothing. And so she said God bless you, and went.”
“And did she go—”
“Yes,” cried the girl, anticipating the inquiry. “Yes! She went the way
I had shown her. Then I came in, and Mrs. Snagsby came behind me
from somewhere and laid hold of me, and I was frightened.”
Mr. Woodcourt took her kindly from me. Mr. Bucket wrapped
me up, and immediately we were in the street. Mr. Woodcourt hesi-
tated, but I said, “Don’t leave me now!” and Mr. Bucket added, “You’ll
be better with us, we may want you; don’t lose time!”
I have the most confused impressions of that walk. I recollect that
it was neither night nor day, that morning was dawning but the street-
lamps were not yet put out, that the sleet was still falling and that all
the ways were deep with it. I recollect a few chilled people passing in
the streets. I recollect the wet house-tops, the clogged and bursting
gutters and water-spouts, the mounds of blackened ice and snow
over which we passed, the narrowness of the courts by which we
went. At the same time I remember that the poor girl seemed to be
yet telling her story audibly and plainly in my
hearing, that I could feel her resting on my arm, that the stained
house-fronts put on human shapes and looked at me, that great wa-
ter-gates seemed to be opening and closing in my head or in the air,
and that the unreal things were more substantial than the real.
At last we stood under a dark and miserable covered way, where one
lamp was burning over an iron gate and where the morning faintly
struggled in. The gate was closed. Beyond it was a burial ground—a
dreadful spot in which the night was very slowly stirring, but where I
could dimly see heaps of dishonoured graves and stones, hemmed in
by filthy houses with a few dull lights in their windows and on whose
walls a thick humidity broke out like a disease. On the step at the gate,
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drenched in the fearful wet of such a place, which oozed and splashed
down everywhere, I saw, with a cry of pity and horror, a woman ly-
ing—Jenny, the mother of the dead child.
I ran forward, but they stopped me, and Mr. Woodcourt entreated
me with the greatest earnestness, even with tears, before I went up to
the figure to listen for an instant to what Mr. Bucket said. I did so, as
I thought. I did so, as I am sure.
“Miss Summerson, you’ll understand me, if you think a moment.
They changed clothes at the cottage.”
They changed clothes at the cottage. I could repeat the words in
my mind, and I knew what they meant of themselves, but I attached
no meaning to them in any other connexion.
“And one returned,” said Mr. Bucket, “and one went on. And the
one that went on only went on a certain way agreed upon to deceive
and then turned across country and went home. Think a moment!”
I could repeat this in my mind too, but I had not the least idea
what it meant. I saw before me, lying on the step, the mother of the
dead child. She lay there with one arm creeping round a bar of the
iron gate and seeming to embrace it. She lay there, who had so lately
spoken to my mother. She lay there, a distressed, unsheltered, sense-
less creature. She who had brought my mother’s letter, who could
give me the only clue to where my mother was; she, who was to
guide us to rescue and save her whom we had sought so far, who had
come to this condition by some means connected with my mother
that I could not follow, and might be passing beyond our reach and
help at that moment; she lay there, and they stopped me! I saw but
did not comprehend the solemn and compassionate look in Mr.
Woodcourt’s face. I saw but did not comprehend his touching the
other on the breast to keep him back. I saw him stand uncovered in
the bitter air, with a reverence for something. But my understanding
for all this was gone.
I even heard it said between them, “Shall she go?”
“She had better go. Her hands should be the first to touch her.
They have a higher right than ours.”
I passed on to the gate and stooped down. I lifted the heavy head,
put the long dank hair aside, and turned the face. And it was my
mother, cold and dead.
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CHAPTER LX
Perspective
I PROCEED TO OTHER PASSAGES of my narrative. From the goodness of
all about me I derived such consolation as I can never think of un-
moved. I have already said so much of myself, and so much still
remains, that I will not dwell upon my sorrow. I had an illness, but it
was not a long one; and I would avoid even this mention of it if I
could quite keep down the recollection of their sympathy.
I proceed to other passages of my narrative.
During the time of my illness, we were still in London, where
Mrs. Woodcourt had come, on my guardian’s invitation, to stay with
us. When my guardian thought me well and cheerful enough to talk
with him in our old way—though I could have done that sooner if
he would have believed me—I resumed my work and my chair be-
side his. He had appointed the time himself, and we were alone.
“Dame Trot,” said he, receiving me with a kiss, “welcome to the
growlery again, my dear. I have a scheme to develop, little woman. I
propose to remain here, perhaps for six months, perhaps for a longer
time—as it may be. Quite to settle here for a while, in short.”
“And in the meanwhile leave Bleak House?” said I.
“Aye, my dear? Bleak House,” he returned, “must learn to take
care of itself.”
I thought his tone sounded sorrowful, but looking at him, I saw
his kind face lighted up by its pleasantest smile.
“Bleak House,” he repeated—and his tone did not sound sorrow-
ful, I found—”must learn to take care of itself. It is a long way from
Ada, my dear, and Ada stands much in need of you.”
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“It’s like you, guardian,” said I, “to have been taking that into con-
sideration for a happy surprise to both of us.”
“Not so disinterested either, my dear, if you mean to extol me for
that virtue, since if you were generally on the road, you could be
seldom with me. And besides, I wish to hear as much and as often of
Ada as I can in this condition of estrangement from poor Rick. Not
of her alone, but of him too, poor fellow.”
“Have you seen Mr. Woodcourt, this morning, guardian?”
“I see Mr. Woodcourt every morning, Dame Durden.”
“Does he still say the same of Richard?”
“Just the same. He knows of no direct bodily illness that he has;
on the contrary, he believes that he has none. Yet he is not easy about
him; who can be?”
My dear girl had been to see us lately every day, some times twice in a
day. But we had foreseen, all along, that this would only last until I was
quite myself. We knew full well that her fervent heart was as full of affec-
tion and gratitude towards her cousin John as it had ever been, and we
acquitted Richard of laying any injunctions upon her to stay away; but we
knew on the other hand that she felt it a part of her duty to him to be
sparing of her visits at our house. My guardian’s delicacy had soon per-
ceived this and had tried to convey to her that he thought she was right.
“Dear, unfortunate, mistaken Richard,” said I. “When will he awake
from his delusion!”
“He is not in the way to do so now, my dear,” replied my guard-
ian. “The more he suffers, the more averse he will be to me, having
made me the principal representative of the great occasion of his
suffering.”
I could not help adding, “So unreasonably!”
“Ah, Dame Trot, Dame Trot,” returned my guardian, “what shall
we find reasonable in Jarndyce and Jarndyce! Unreason and injustice
at the top, unreason and injustice at the heart and at the bottom,
unreason and injustice from beginning to end—if it ever has an end—
how should poor Rick, always hovering near it, pluck reason out of
it? He no more gathers grapes from thorns or figs from thistles than
older men did in old times.”
His gentleness and consideration for Richard whenever we spoke of
him touched me so that I was always silent on this subject very soon.
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“I suppose the Lord Chancellor, and the Vice Chancellors, and the
whole Chancery battery of great guns would be infinitely astonished
by such unreason and injustice in one of their suitors,” pursued my
guardian. “When those learned gentlemen begin to raise moss-roses
from the powder they sow in their wigs, I shall begin to be aston-
ished too!”
He checked himself in glancing towards the window to look where
the wind was and leaned on the back of my chair instead.
“Well, well, little woman! To go on, my dear. This rock we must leave
to time, chance, and hopeful circumstance. We must not shipwreck Ada
upon it. She cannot afford, and he cannot afford, the remotest chance of
another separation from a friend. Therefore I have particularly begged of
Woodcourt, and I now particularly beg of you, my dear, not to move
this subject with Rick. Let it rest. Next week, next month, next year,
sooner or later, he will see me with clearer eyes. I can wait.”
But I had already discussed it with him, I confessed; and so, I
thought, had Mr. Woodcourt.
“So he tells me,” returned my guardian. “Very good. He has made
his protest, and Dame Durden has made hers, and there is nothing
more to be said about it. Now I come to Mrs. Woodcourt. How do
you like her, my dear?”
In answer to this question, which was oddly abrupt, I said I liked her
very much and thought she was more agreeable than she used to be.
“I think so too,” said my guardian. “Less pedigree? Not so much
of Morgan ap—what’s his name?”
That was what I meant, I acknowledged, though he was a very
harmless person, even when we had had more of him.
“Still, upon the whole, he is as well in his native mountains,” said
my guardian. “I agree with you. Then, little woman, can I do better
for a time than retain Mrs. Woodcourt here?”
No. And yet—
My guardian looked at me, waiting for what I had to say.
I had nothing to say. At least I had nothing in my mind that I
could say. I had an undefined impression that it might have been
better if we had had some other inmate, but I could hardly have
explained why even to myself. Or, if to myself, certainly not to any-
body else.
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pose, but the ambition that calmly trusts itself to such a road, instead
of spasmodically trying to fly over it, is of the kind I care for. It is
Woodcourt’s kind.”
“And will he get this appointment?” I asked.
“Why, little woman,” returned my guardian, smiling, “not being an
oracle, I cannot confidently say, but I think so. His reputation stands very
high; there were people from that part of the country in the shipwreck; and
strange to say, I believe the best man has the best chance. You must not
suppose it to be a fine endowment. It is a very, very commonplace affair,
my dear, an appointment to a great amount of work and a small amount
of pay; but better things will gather about it, it may be fairly hoped.”
“The poor of that place will have reason to bless the choice if it
falls on Mr. Woodcourt, guardian.”
“You are right, little woman; that I am sure they will.”
We said no more about it, nor did he say a word about the future
of Bleak House. But it was the first time I had taken my seat at his
side in my mourning dress, and that accounted for it, I considered.
I now began to visit my dear girl every day in the dull dark corner
where she lived. The morning was my usual time, but whenever I
found I had an hour or so to spare, I put on my bonnet and bustled
off to Chancery Lane. They were both so glad to see me at all hours,
and used to brighten up so when they heard me opening the door
and coming in (being quite at home, I never knocked), that I had no
fear of becoming troublesome just yet.
On these occasions I frequently found Richard absent. At other times
he would be writing or reading papers in the cause at that table of his,
so covered with papers, which was never disturbed. Sometimes I would
come upon him lingering at the door of Mr. Vholes’s office. Some-
times I would meet him in the neighbourhood lounging about and
biting his nails. I often met him wandering in Lincoln’s Inn, near the
place where I had first seen him, oh how different, how different!
That the money Ada brought him was melting away with the
candles I used to see burning after dark in Mr. Vholes’s office I knew
very well. It was not a large amount in the beginning, he had married
in debt, and I could not fail to understand, by this time, what was
meant by Mr. Vholes’s shoulder being at the wheel—as I still heard it
was. My dear made the best of housekeepers and tried hard to save,
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but I knew that they were getting poorer and poorer every day.
She shone in the miserable corner like a beautiful star. She
adorned and graced it so that it became another place. Paler than she
had been at home, and a little quieter than I had thought natural
when she was yet so cheerful and hopeful, her face was so unshadowed
that I half believed she was blinded by her love for Richard to his
ruinous career.
I went one day to dine with them while I was under this impres-
sion. As I turned into Symond’s Inn, I met little Miss Flite coming
out. She had been to make a stately call upon the wards in Jarndyce,
as she still called them, and had derived the highest gratification from
that ceremony. Ada had already told me that she called every Mon-
day at five o’clock, with one little extra white bow in her bonnet,
which never appeared there at any other time, and with her largest
reticule of documents on her arm.
“My dear!” she began. “So delighted! How do you do! So glad to see
you. And you are going to visit our interesting Jarndyce wards? to be
sure! Our beauty is at home, my dear, and will be charmed to see you.”
“Then Richard is not come in yet?” said I. “I am glad of that, for I
was afraid of being a little late.”
“No, he is not come in,” returned Miss Flite. “He has had a long
day in court. I left him there with Vholes. You don’t like Vholes, I
hope? Don’t like Vholes. Dan-gerous man!”
“I am afraid you see Richard oftener than ever now,” said I.
“My dearest,” returned Miss Flite, “daily and hourly. You know
what I told you of the attraction on the Chancellor’s table? My dear,
next to myself he is the most constant suitor in court. He begins
quite to amuse our little party. Ve-ry friendly little party, are we not?”
It was miserable to hear this from her poor mad lips, though it
was no surprise.
“In short, my valued friend,” pursued Miss Flite, advancing her lips to
my ear with an air of equal patronage and mystery, “I must tell you a
secret. I have made him my executor. Nominated, constituted, and ap-
pointed him. In my will. Ye-es.”
“Indeed?” said I.
“Ye-es,” repeated Miss Flite in her most genteel accents, “my ex-
ecutor, administrator, and assign. (Our Chancery phrases, my love.) I
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have reflected that if I should wear out, he will be able to watch that
judgment. Being so very regular in his attendance.”
It made me sigh to think of him.
“I did at one time mean,” said Miss Flite, echoing the sigh, “to
nominate, constitute, and appoint poor Gridley. Also very regular,
my charming girl. I assure you, most exemplary! But he wore out,
poor man, so I have appointed his successor. Don’t mention it. This
is in confidence.”
She carefully opened her reticule a little way and showed me a
folded piece of paper inside as the appointment of which she spoke.
“Another secret, my dear. I have added to my collection of birds.”
“Really, Miss Flite?” said I, knowing how it pleased her to have her
confidence received with an appearance of interest.
She nodded several times, and her face became overcast and gloomy.
“Two more. I call them the Wards in Jarndyce. They are caged up
with all the others. With Hope, Joy, Youth, Peace, Rest, Life, Dust,
Ashes, Waste, Want, Ruin, Despair, Madness, Death, Cunning, Folly,
Words, Wigs, Rags, Sheepskin, Plunder, Precedent, Jargon, Gammon,
and Spinach!”
The poor soul kissed me with the most troubled look I had ever
seen in her and went her way. Her manner of running over the names
of her birds, as if she were afraid of hearing them even from her own
lips, quite chilled me.
This was not a cheering preparation for my visit, and I could have
dispensed with the company of Mr. Vholes, when Richard (who
arrived within a minute or two after me) brought him to share our
dinner. Although it was a very plain one, Ada and Richard were for
some minutes both out of the room together helping to get ready
what we were to eat and drink. Mr. Vholes took that opportunity of
holding a little conversation in a low voice with me. He came to the
window where I was sitting and began upon Symond’s Inn.
“A dull place, Miss Summerson, for a life that is not an official
one,” said Mr. Vholes, smearing the glass with his black glove to
make it clearer for me.
“There is not much to see here,” said I.
“Nor to hear, miss,” returned Mr. Vholes. “A little music does
occasionally stray in, but we are not musical in the law and soon eject
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it. I hope Mr. Jarndyce is as well as his friends could wish him?”
I thanked Mr. Vholes and said he was quite well.
“I have not the pleasure to be admitted among the number of his
friends myself,” said Mr. Vholes, “and I am aware that the gentlemen
of our profession are sometimes regarded in such quarters with an
unfavourable eye. Our plain course, however, under good report and
evil report, and all kinds of prejudice (we are the victims of preju-
dice), is to have everything openly carried on. How do you find Mr.
C. looking, Miss Summerson?”
“He looks very ill. Dreadfully anxious.”
“Just so,” said Mr. Vholes.
He stood behind me with his long black figure reaching nearly to
the ceiling of those low rooms, feeling the pimples on his face as if
they were ornaments and speaking inwardly and evenly as though
there were not a human passion or emotion in his nature.
“Mr. Woodcourt is in attendance upon Mr. C., I believe?” he re-
sumed.
“Mr. Woodcourt is his disinterested friend,” I answered.
“But I mean in professional attendance, medical attendance.”
“That can do little for an unhappy mind,” said I.
“Just so,” said Mr. Vholes.
So slow, so eager, so bloodless and gaunt, I felt as if Richard were
wasting away beneath the eyes of this adviser and there were some-
thing of the vampire in him.
“Miss Summerson,” said Mr. Vholes, very slowly rubbing his
gloved hands, as if, to his cold sense of touch, they were much the
same in black kid or out of it, “this was an ill-advised marriage of Mr.
C.’s.”
I begged he would excuse me from discussing it. They had been
engaged when they were both very young, I told him (a little indig-
nantly) and when the prospect before them was much fairer and
brighter. When Richard had not yielded himself to the unhappy in-
fluence which now darkened his life.
“Just so,” assented Mr. Vholes again. “Still, with a view to
everything being openly carried on, I will, with your permission,
Miss Summerson, observe to you that I consider this a very ill-ad-
vised marriage indeed. I owe the opinion not only to Mr. C.’s
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I have carried it out; I do carry it out. But I will not smooth things
over to any connexion of Mr. C.’s on any account. As open as I was
to Mr. Jarndyce, I am to you. I regard it in the light of a professional
duty to be so, though it can be charged to no one. I openly say,
unpalatable as it may be, that I consider Mr. C.’s affairs in a very bad
way, that I consider Mr. C. himself in a very bad way, and that I
regard this as an exceedingly ill-advised marriage. Am I here, sir? Yes,
I thank you; I am here, Mr. C., and enjoying the pleasure of some
agreeable conversation with Miss Summerson, for which I have to
thank you very much, sir!”
He broke off thus in answer to Richard, who addressed him as he
came into the room. By this time I too well understood Mr. Vholes’s
scrupulous way of saving himself and his respectability not to feel
that our worst fears did but keep pace with his client’s progress.
We sat down to dinner, and I had an opportunity of observing Rich-
ard, anxiously. I was not disturbed by Mr. Vholes (who took off his
gloves to dine), though he sat opposite to me at the small table, for I
doubt if, looking up at all, he once removed his eyes from his host’s
face. I found Richard thin and languid, slovenly in his dress, ab-
stracted in his manner, forcing his spirits now and then, and at other
intervals relapsing into a dull thoughtfulness. About his large bright
eyes that used to be so merry there was a wanness and a restlessness
that changed them altogether. 1 cannot use the expression that he
looked old. There is a ruin of youth which is not like age, and into
such a ruin Richard’s youth and youthful beauty had all fallen away.
He ate little and seemed indifferent what it was, showed himself
to be much more impatient than he used to be, and was quick even
with Ada. I thought at first that his old light-hearted manner was all
gone, but it shone out of him sometimes as I had occasionally known
little momentary glimpses of my own old face to look out upon me
from the glass. His laugh had not quite left him either, but it was like
the echo of a joyful sound, and that is always sorrowful.
Yet he was as glad as ever, in his old affectionate way, to have me
there, and we talked of the old times pleasantly. These did not appear
to be interesting to Mr. Vholes, though he occasionally made a gasp
which I believe was his smile. He rose shortly after dinner and said
that with the permission of the ladies he would retire to his office.
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there, and because he had always liked Richard, and Richard had al-
ways liked him, and—and so forth.
“All true,” said Ada, “but that he is such a devoted friend to us we
owe to you.”
I thought it best to let my dear girl have her way and to say no
more about it. So I said as much. I said it lightly, because I felt her
trembling.
“Esther, my dearest, I want to be a good wife, a very, very good
wife indeed. You shall teach me.”
I teach! I said no more, for I noticed the hand that was fluttering over
the keys, and I knew that it was not I who ought to speak, that it was she
who had something to say to me.
“When I married Richard I was not insensible to what was before him.
I had been perfectly happy for a long time with you, and I had never
known any trouble or anxiety, so loved and cared for, but I understood the
danger he was in, dear Esther.”
“I know, I know, my darling.”
“When we were married I had some little hope that I might be
able to convince him of his mistake, that he might come to regard it
in a new way as my husband and not pursue it all the more desper-
ately for my sake—as he does. But if I had not had that hope, I
would have married him just the same, Esther. Just the same!”
In the momentary firmness of the hand that was never still—a
firmness inspired by the utterance of these last words, and dying
away with them—I saw the confirmation of her earnest tones.
“You are not to think, my dearest Esther, that I fail to see what you
see and fear what you fear. No one can understand him better than I
do. The greatest wisdom that ever lived in the world could scarcely
know Richard better than my love does.”
She spoke so modestly and softly and her trembling hand expressed
such agitation as it moved to and fro upon the silent notes! My dear,
dear girl!
“I see him at his worst every day. I watch him in his sleep. I know
every change of his face. But when I married Richard I was quite
determined, Esther, if heaven would help me, never to show him
that I grieved for what he did and so to make him more unhappy. I
want him, when he comes home, to find no trouble in my face. I
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want him, when he looks at me, to see what he loved in me. I mar-
ried him to do this, and this supports me.”
I felt her trembling more. I waited for what was yet to come, and
I now thought I began to know what it was.
“And something else supports me, Esther.”
She stopped a minute. Stopped speaking only; her hand was still
in motion.
“I look forward a little while, and I don’t know what great aid may
come to me. When Richard turns his eyes upon me then, there may
be something lying on my breast more eloquent than I have been,
with greater power than mine to show him his true course and win
him back.”
Her hand stopped now. She clasped me in her arms, and I clasped
her in mine.
“If that little creature should fail too, Esther, I still look forward. I
look forward a long while, through years and years, and think that
then, when I am growing old, or when I am dead perhaps, a beauti-
ful woman, his daughter, happily married, may be proud of him and
a blessing to him. Or that a generous brave man, as handsome as he
used to be, as hopeful, and far more happy, may walk in the sunshine
with him, honouring his grey head and saying to himself, ‘I thank
God this is my father! Ruined by a fatal inheritance, and restored
through me!’”
Oh, my sweet girl, what a heart was that which beat so fast against
me!
“These hopes uphold me, my dear Esther, and I know they will.
Though sometimes even they depart from me before a dread that
arises when I look at Richard.”
I tried to cheer my darling, and asked her what it was. Sobbing
and weeping, she replied, “That he may not live to see his child.”
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CHAPTER LXI
A Discovery
The days when I frequented that miserable corner which my dear girl
brightened can never fade in my remembrance. I never see it, and I
never wish to see it now; I have been there only once since, but in my
memory there is a mournful glory shining on the place which will
shine for ever.
Not a day passed without my going there, of course. At first I
found Mr. Skimpole there, on two or three occasions, idly playing
the piano and talking in his usual vivacious strain. Now, besides my
very much mistrusting the probability of his being there without
making Richard poorer, I felt as if there were something in his care-
less gaiety too inconsistent with what I knew of the depths of Ada’s
life. I clearly perceived, too, that Ada shared my feelings. I therefore
resolved, after much thinking of it, to make a private visit to Mr.
Skimpole and try delicately to explain myself. My dear girl was the
great consideration that made me bold.
I set off one morning, accompanied by Charley, for Somers Town. As I
approached the house, I was strongly inclined to turn back, for I felt what
a desperate attempt it was to make an impression on Mr. Skimpole and
how extremely likely it was that he would signally defeat me. However, I
thought that being there, I would go through with it. I knocked with a
trembling hand at Mr. Skimpole’s door—literally with a hand, for the
knocker was gone—and after a long parley gained admission from an
Irishwoman, who was in the area when I knocked, breaking up the lid of
a water-butt with a poker to light the fire with.
Mr. Skimpole, lying on the sofa in his room, playing the flute a
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little, was enchanted to see me. Now, who should receive me, he asked.
Who would I prefer for mistress of the ceremonies? Would I have his
Comedy daughter, his Beauty daughter, or his Sentiment daughter?
Or would I have all the daughters at once in a perfect nosegay?
I replied, half defeated already, that I wished to speak to himself
only if he would give me leave.
‘My dear Miss Summerson, most joyfully! Of course,” he said, bring-
ing his chair nearer mine and breaking into his fascinating smile, of
course it’s not business. Then it’s pleasure!”
I said it certainly was not business that I came upon, but it was not
quite a pleasant matter.
“Then, my dear Miss Summerson,” said he with the frankest gai-
ety, “don’t allude to it. Why should you allude to anything that is not
a pleasant matter? I never do. And you are a much pleasanter crea-
ture, in every point of view, than I. You are perfectly pleasant; I am
imperfectly pleasant; then, if I never allude to an unpleasant matter,
how much less should you! So that’s disposed of, and we will talk of
something else.”
Although I was embarrassed, I took courage to intimate that I still
wished to pursue the subject.
“I should think it a mistake,” said Mr. Skimpole with his airy
laugh, “if I thought Miss Summerson capable of making one. But I
don’t!”
“Mr. Skimpole,” said I, raising my eyes to his, “I have so often
heard you say that you are unacquainted with the common affairs of
life—”
“Meaning our three banking-house friends, L, S, and who’s the
junior partner? D?” said Mr. Skimpole, brightly. “Not an idea of
them!”
“—That perhaps,” I went on, “you will excuse my boldness on
that account. I think you ought most seriously to know that Richard
is poorer than he was.”
“Dear me!” said Mr. Skimpole. “So am I, they tell me.”
“And in very embarrassed circumstances.”
“Parallel case, exactly!” said Mr. Skimpole with a delighted
countenance.
“This at present naturally causes Ada much secret anxiety, and as I
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think she is less anxious when no claims are made upon her by visi-
tors, and as Richard has one uneasiness always heavy on his mind, it
has occurred to me to take the liberty of saying that—if you would—
not—”
I was coming to the point with great difficulty when he took me
by both hands and with a radiant face and in the liveliest way antici-
pated it.
“Not go there? Certainly not, my dear Miss Summerson, most
assuredly not. Why should I go there? When I go anywhere, I go for
pleasure. I don’t go anywhere for pain, because I was made for plea-
sure. Pain comes to me when it wants me. Now, I have had very little
pleasure at our dear Richard’s lately, and your practical sagacity dem-
onstrates why. Our young friends, losing the youthful poetry which
was once so captivating in them, begin to think, ‘This is a man who
wants pounds.’ So I am; I always want pounds; not for
myself, but because tradespeople always want them of me. Next, our
young friends begin to think, becoming mercenary, ‘This is the man
who had pounds, who borrowed them,’ which I did. I always bor-
row pounds. So our young friends, reduced to prose (which is much
to be regretted), degenerate in their power of imparting pleasure to
me. Why should I go to see them, therefore? Absurd!”
Through the beaming smile with which he regarded me as he rea-
soned thus, there now broke forth a look of disinterested benevo-
lence quite astonishing.
“Besides,” he said, pursuing his argument in his tone of light-hearted
conviction, “if I don’t go anywhere for pain—which would be a per-
version of the intention of my being, and a monstrous thing to do—
why should I go anywhere to be the cause of pain? If I went to see
our young friends in their present ill-regulated state of mind, I should
give them pain. The associations with me would be disagreeable.
They might say, ‘This is the man who had pounds and who can’t pay
pounds,’ which I can’t, of course; nothing could be more out of the
question! Then kindness requires that I shouldn’t
go near them—and I won’t.”
He finished by genially kissing my hand and thanking me. Noth-
ing but Miss Summerson’s fine tact, he said, would have found this
out for him.
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“No,” said he. “Not by anybody. I don’t attach any value to money.
I don’t care about it, I don’t know about it, I don’t want it, I don’t
keep it—it goes away from me directly. How can I be bribed?”
I showed that I was of a different opinion, though I had not the
capacity for arguing the question.
“On the contrary,” said Mr. Skimpole, “I am exactly the man to be
placed in a superior position in such a case as that. I am above the rest
of mankind in such a case as that. I can act with philosophy in such a
case as that. I am not warped by prejudices, as an Italian baby is by
bandages. I am as free as the air. I feel myself as far above suspicion as
Caesar’s wife.”
Anything to equal the lightness of his manner and the playful impar-
tiality with which he seemed to convince himself, as he tossed the matter
about like a ball of feathers, was surely never seen in anybody else!
“Observe the case, my dear Miss Summerson. Here is a boy re-
ceived into the house and put to bed in a state that I strongly object
to. The boy being in bed, a man arrives—like the house that Jack
built. Here is the man who demands the boy who is received into the
house and put to bed in a state that I strongly object to. Here is a
bank-note produced by the man who demands the boy who is re-
ceived into the house and put to bed in a state that I strongly object
to. Here is the Skimpole who accepts the bank-note produced by the
man who demands the boy who is received into the house and put to
bed in a state that I strongly object to. Those are the facts. Very well.
Should the Skimpole have refused the note? why should the Skimpole
have refused the note? Skimpole protests to Bucket, ‘What’s this for?
I don’t understand it, it is of no use to me, take it away.’ Bucket still
entreats Skimpole to accept it. Are there reasons why Skimpole, not
being warped by prejudices, should accept it? Yes. Skimpole per-
ceives them. What are they? Skimpole reasons with himself, this is a
tamed lynx, an active police-officer, an intelligent man, a person of a
peculiarly directed energy and great subtlety both of conception and
execution, who discovers our friends and enemies for us when they
run away, recovers our property for us when we are robbed, avenges
us comfortably when we are murdered. This active police-officer and
intelligent man has acquired, in the exercise of his art, a strong faith
in money; he finds it very useful to him, and he makes it very useful
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them. And I hope to do, and mean to do, the same down to the last
words of these pages, which I see now not so very far before me.
The months were gliding away, and my dear girl, sustained by the
hopes she had confided in me, was the same beautiful star in the
miserable corner. Richard, more worn and haggard, haunted the court
day after day, listlessly sat there the whole day long when he knew
there was no remote chance of the suit being mentioned, and became
one of the stock sights of the place. I wonder whether any of the
gentlemen remembered him as he was when he first went there.
So completely was he absorbed in his fixed idea that he used to
avow in his cheerful moments that he should never have breathed
the fresh air now “but for Woodcourt.” It was only Mr. Woodcourt
who could occasionally divert his attention for a few hours at a time
and rouse him, even when he sunk into a lethargy of mind and body
that alarmed us greatly, and the returns of which became more fre-
quent as the months went on. My dear girl was right in saying that
he only pursued his errors the more desperately for her sake. I have
no doubt that his desire to retrieve what he had lost was rendered the
more intense by his grief for his young wife, and became like the
madness of a gamester.
I was there, as I have mentioned, at all hours. When I was there at
night, I generally went home with Charley in a coach; sometimes my
guardian would meet me in the neighbourhood, and we would walk
home together. One evening he had arranged to meet me at eight
o’clock. I could not leave, as I usually did, quite punctually at the
time, for I was working for my dear girl and had a few stitches more
to do to finish what I was about; but it was within a few minutes of
the hour when I bundled up my little work-basket, gave my darling
my last kiss for the night, and hurried downstairs. Mr. Woodcourt
went with me, as it was dusk.
When we came to the usual place of meeting—it was close by, and
Mr. Woodcourt had often accompanied me before—my guardian
was not there. We waited half an hour, walking up and down, but
there were no signs of him. We agreed that he was either prevented
from coming or that he had come and gone away, and Mr. Woodcourt
proposed to walk home with me.
It was the first walk we had ever taken together, except that very
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true, I aspired to be more worthy of it. It was not too late for that.
Although I closed this unforeseen page in my life to-night, I could be
worthier of it all through my life. And it was a comfort to me, and
an impulse to me, and I felt a dignity rise up within me that was
derived from him when I thought so.
He broke the silence.
“I should poorly show the trust that I have in the dear one who
will evermore be as dear to me as now”—and the deep earnestness
with which he said it at once strengthened me and made me weep—
“if, after her assurance that she is not free to think of my love, I urged
it. Dear Esther, let me only tell you that the fond idea of you which
I took abroad was exalted to the heavens when I came home. I have
always hoped, in the first hour when I seemed to stand in any ray of
good fortune, to tell you this. I have always feared that I should tell
it you in vain. My hopes and fears are both fulfilled to-night. I dis-
tress you. I have said enough.”
Something seemed to pass into my place that was like the angel he
thought me, and I felt so sorrowful for the loss he had sustained! I wished
to help him in his trouble, as I had wished to do when he showed that
first commiseration for me.
“Dear Mr. Woodcourt,” said I, “before we part to-night, some-
thing is left for me to say. I never could say it as I wish—I never
shall—but—”
I had to think again of being more deserving of his love and his
affliction before I could go on.
“—I am deeply sensible of your generosity, and I shall treasure its
remembrance to my dying hour. I know full well how changed I am,
I know you are not unacquainted with my history, and I know what
a noble love that is which is so faithful. What you have said to me
could have affected me so much from no other lips, for there are
none that could give it such a value to me. It shall not be lost. It shall
make me better.”
He covered his eyes with his hand and turned away his head. How
could I ever be worthy of those tears?
“If, in the unchanged intercourse we shall have together—in tend-
ing Richard and Ada, and I hope in many happier scenes of life—you
ever find anything in me which you can honestly think is better than
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it used to be, believe that it will have sprung up from to-night and
that I shall owe it to you. And never believe, dear dear Mr.
Woodcourt, never believe that I forget this night or that while my
heart beats it can be insensible to the pride and joy of having been
beloved by you.”
He took my hand and kissed it. He was like himself again, and I
felt still more encouraged.
“I am induced by what you said just now,” said I, “to hope that
you have succeeded in your endeavour.”
“I have,” he answered. “With such help from Mr. Jarndyce as you
who know him so well can imagine him to have rendered me, I have
succeeded.”
“Heaven bless him for it,” said I, giving him my hand; “and heaven
bless you in all you do!”
“I shall do it better for the wish,” he answered; “it will make me
enter on these new duties as on another sacred trust from you.”
“Ah! Richard!” I exclaimed involuntarily, “What will he do when
you are gone!”
“I am not required to go yet; I would not desert him, dear Miss
Summerson, even if I were.”
One other thing I felt it needful to touch upon before he left me.
I knew that I should not be worthier of the love I could not take if I
reserved it.
“Mr. Woodcourt,” said I, “you will be glad to know from my lips
before I say good night that in the future, which is clear and bright
before me, I am most happy, most fortunate, have nothing to regret
or desire.”
It was indeed a glad hearing to him, he replied.
“From my childhood I have been,” said I, “the object of the untir-
ing goodness of the best of human beings, to whom I am so bound
by every tie of attachment, gratitude, and love, that nothing I could
do in the compass of a life could express the feelings of a single day.”
“I share those feelings,” he returned. “You speak of Mr.
Jarndyce.”
“You know his virtues well,” said I, “but few can know the
greatness of his character as I know it. All its highest and best quali-
ties have been revealed to me in nothing more brightly than in the
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CHAPTER LXII
Another Discovery
I HAD NOT THE COURAGE to see any one that night. I had not even the
courage to see myself, for I was afraid that my tears might a little
reproach me. I went up to my room in the dark, and prayed in the
dark, and lay down in the dark to sleep. I had no need of any light to
read my guardian’s letter by, for I knew it by heart. I took it from the
place where I kept it, and repeated its contents by its own clear light
of integrity and love, and went to sleep with it on my pillow.
I was up very early in the morning and called Charley to come for
a walk. We bought flowers for the breakfast-table, and came back
and arranged them, and were as busy as possible. We were so early
that I had a good time still for Charley’s lesson before breakfast;
Charley (who was not in the least improved in the old defective
article of grammar) came through it with great applause; and we
were altogether very notable. When my guardian appeared he said,
“Why, little woman, you look fresher than your flowers!” And Mrs.
Woodcourt repeated and translated a passage from the
Mewlinnwillinwodd expressive of my being like a mountain with
the sun upon it.
This was all so pleasant that I hope it made me still more like the
mountain than I had been before. After breakfast I waited my oppor-
tunity and peeped about a little until I saw my guardian in his own
room—the room of last night—by himself. Then I made an excuse to
go in with my housekeeping keys, shutting the door after me.
“Well, Dame Durden?” said my guardian; the post had brought
him several letters, and he was writing. “You want money?”
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“Now, moral, you know!” said Mr. Bucket, improving the acci-
dent. “Don’t you contradict when there ain’t no occasion, and you
won’t be took in that way. Now, Mr. Jarndyce, I address myself to
you. I’ve been negotiating with this gentleman on behalf of Sir Le-
icester Dedlock, Baronet, and one way and another I’ve been in and
out and about his premises a deal. His premises are the premises
formerly occupied by Krook, marine store dealer—a relation of this
gentleman’s that you saw in his life-time if I don’t mistake?”
My guardian replied, “Yes.”
“Well! You are to understand,” said Mr. Bucket, “that this
gentleman he come into Krook’s property, and a good deal of mag-
pie property there was. Vast lots of waste-paper among the rest. Lord
bless you, of no use to nobody!”
The cunning of Mr. Bucket’s eye and the masterly manner in which
he contrived, without a look or a word against which his watchful
auditor could protest, to let us know that he stated the case according
to previous agreement and could say much more of Mr. Smallweed if
he thought it advisable, deprived us of any merit in quite understand-
ing him. His difficulty was increased by Mr. Smallweed’s being deaf as
well as suspicious and watching his face with the closest attention.
“Among them odd heaps of old papers, this gentleman, when he
comes into the property, naturally begins to rummage, don’t you
see?” said Mr. Bucket.
“To which? Say that again,” cried Mr. Smallweed in a shrill, sharp
voice.
“To rummage,” repeated Mr. Bucket. “Being a prudent man and
accustomed to take care of your own affairs, you begin to rummage
among the papers as you have come into; don’t you?”
“Of course I do,” cried Mr. Smallweed.
“Of course you do,” said Mr. Bucket conversationally, “and much
to blame you would be if you didn’t. And so you chance to find, you
know,” Mr. Bucket went on, stooping over him with an air of cheer-
ful raillery which Mr. Smallweed by no means reciprocated, “and so
you chance to find, you know, a paper with the signature of Jarndyce
to it. Don’t you?”
Mr. Smallweed glanced with a troubled eye at us and grudgingly
nodded assent.
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wouldn’t sell the other for a pound or two, except the old lady—and
she’s only out of it because she’s too weak in her mind to drive a
bargain.”
“Mr Bucket,” said my guardian aloud, “whatever the worth of this
paper may be to any one, my obligations are great to you; and if it be
of any worth, I hold myself bound to see Mr. Smallweed remuner-
ated accordingly.”
“Not according to your merits, you know,” said Mr. Bucket in
friendly explanation to Mr. Smallweed. “Don’t you be afraid of that.
According to its value.”
“That is what I mean,” said my guardian. “You may observe, Mr.
Bucket, that I abstain from examining this paper myself. The plain
truth is, I have forsworn and abjured the whole business these many
years, and my soul is sick of it. But Miss Summerson and I will
immediately place the paper in the hands of my solicitor in the cause,
and its existence shall be made known without delay to all other
parties interested.”
“Mr. Jarndyce can’t say fairer than that, you understand,” observed
Mr. Bucket to his fellow-visitor. “And it being now made clear to
you that nobody’s a-going to be wronged—which must be a great
relief to your mind—we may proceed with the ceremony of chairing
you home again.”
He unbolted the door, called in the bearers, wished us good morn-
ing, and with a look full of meaning and a crook of his finger at
parting went his way.
We went our way too, which was to Lincoln’s Inn, as quickly as
possible. Mr. Kenge was disengaged, and we found him at his table
in his dusty room with the inexpressive-looking books and the piles
of papers. Chairs having been placed for us by Mr. Guppy, Mr. Kenge
expressed the surprise and gratification he felt at the unusual sight of
Mr. Jarndyce in his office. He turned over his double eye-glass as he
spoke and was more Conversation Kenge than ever.
“I hope,” said Mr. Kenge, “that the genial influence of Miss
Summerson,” he bowed to me, “may have induced Mr. Jarndyce,”
he bowed to him, “to forego some little of his animosity towards a
cause and towards a court which are—shall I say, which take their
place in the stately vista of the pillars of our profession?”
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suit brought into this vile court of Chancery could fall to my two
young cousins, I should be well contented. But do you ask me to
believe that any good is to come of Jarndyce and Jarndyce?”
“Oh, really, Mr. Jarndyce! Prejudice, prejudice. My dear sir, this is
a very great country, a very great country. Its system of equity is a
very great system, a very great system. Really, really!”
My guardian said no more, and Mr. Vholes arrived. He was mod-
estly impressed by Mr. Kenge’s professional eminence.
“How do you do, Mr. Vholes? Willl you be so good as to take a
chair here by me and look over this paper?”
Mr. Vholes did as he was asked and seemed to read it every word.
He was not excited by it, but he was not excited by anything. When
he had well examined it, he retired with Mr. Kenge into a window,
and shading his mouth with his black glove, spoke to him at some
length. I was not surprised to observe Mr. Kenge inclined to dispute
what he said before he had said much, for I knew that no two people
ever did agree about anything in Jarndyce and Jarndyce. But he seemed
to get the better of Mr. Kenge too in a conversation that sounded as
if it were almost composed of the words “Receiver-General,” “Ac-
countant-General,” “report,” “estate,” and “costs.” When they had
finished, they came back to Mr. Kenge’s table and spoke aloud.
“Well! But this is a very remarkable document, Mr. Vholes,” said
Mr. Kenge.
Mr. Vholes said, “Very much so.”
“And a very important document, Mr. Vholes,” said Mr. Kenge.
Again Mr. Vholes said, “Very much so.”
“And as you say, Mr. Vholes, when the cause is in the paper next term,
this document will be an unexpected and interesting feature in it,” said
Mr. Kenge, looking loftily at my guardian.
Mr. Vholes was gratified, as a smaller practitioner striving to keep
respectable, to be confirmed in any opinion of his own by such an
authority.
“And when,” asked my guardian, rising after a pause, during which
Mr. Kenge had rattled his money and Mr. Vholes had picked his
pimples, “when is next term?”
“Next term, Mr. Jarndyce, will be next month,” said Mr. Kenge.
“Of course we shall at once proceed to do what is necessary with this
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CHAPTER LXIII
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“So far from it,” he declares at the end of a full account of what
has preceded his arrival there, “I had very little idea of making myself
known. I thought if you took by any means forgivingly to my name
I might gradually get myself up to the point of writing a letter. But I
should not have been surprised, brother, if you had considered it
anything but welcome news to hear of me.”
“We will show you at home what kind of news we think it, George,”
returns his brother. “This is a great day at home, and you could not
have arrived, you bronzed old soldier, on a better. I make an agree-
ment with my son Watt to-day that on this day twelvemonth he
shall marry as pretty and as good a girl as you have seen in all your
travels. She goes to Germany to-morrow with one of your nieces for
a little polishing up in her education. We make a feast of the event,
and you will be made the hero of it.”
Mr. George is so entirely overcome at first by this prospect that he
resists the proposed honour with great earnestness. Being overborne,
however, by his brother and his nephew—concerning whom he re-
news his protestations that he never could have thought they would
have been half so glad to see him—he is taken home to an elegant
house in all the arrangements of which there is to be observed a pleas-
ant mixture of the originally simple habits of the father and mother
with such as are suited to their altered station and the higher fortunes
of their children. Here Mr. George is much dismayed by the graces
and accomplishments of his nieces that are and by the beauty of
Rosa, his niece that is to be, and by the affectionate salutations of
these young ladies, which he receives in a sort of dream. He is sorely
taken aback, too, by the dutiful behaviour of his nephew and has a
woeful consciousness upon him of being a scapegrace. However, there
is great rejoicing and a very hearty company and infinite enjoyment,
and Mr. George comes bluff and martial through it all, and his pledge
to be present at the marriage and give away the bride is received with
universal favour. A whirling head has Mr. George that night when he
lies down in the state-bed of his brother’s house to think of all these
things and to see the images of his nieces (awful all the evening in
their floating muslins) waltzing, after the German manner, over his
counterpane.
The brothers are closeted next morning in the ironmaster’s room,
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where the elder is proceeding, in his clear sensible way, to show how
he thinks he may best dispose of George in his business, when George
squeezes his hand and stops him.
“Brother, I thank you a million times for your more than broth-
erly welcome, and a million times more to that for your more than
brotherly intentions. But my plans are made. Before I say a word as
to them, I wish to consult you upon one family point. How,” says
the trooper, folding his arms and looking with indomitable firmness
at his brother, “how is my mother to be got to scratch me?”
“I am not sure that I understand you, George,” replies the
ironmaster.
“I say, brother, how is my mother to be got to scratch me? She
must be got to do it somehow.”
“Scratch you out of her will, I think you mean?”
“Of course I do. In short,” says the trooper, folding his arms more
resolutely yet, “I mean—TO—scratch me!”
“My dear George,” returns his brother, “is it so indispensable that
you should undergo that process?”
“Quite! Absolutely! I couldn’t be guilty of the meanness of
coming back without it. I should never be safe not to be off
again. I have not sneaked home to rob your children, if not
yourself, brother, of your rights. I, who forfeited mine long ago! If I
am to remain and hold up my head, I must be scratched. Come. You
are a man of celebrated penetration and intelligence, and you can tell
me how it’s to be brought about.”
“I can tell you, George,” replies the ironmaster deliberately, “how
it is not to be brought about, which I hope may answer the purpose
as well. Look at our mother, think of her, recall her emotion when
she recovered you. Do you believe there is a consideration in the
world that would induce her to take such a step against her favourite
son? Do you believe there is any chance of her consent, to balance
against the outrage it would be to her (loving dear old lady!) to pro-
pose it? If you do, you are wrong. No, George! You must make up
your mind to remain UNscratched, I think.” There is an amused
smile on the ironmaster’s face as he watches his brother, who is pon-
dering, deeply disappointed. “I think you may manage almost as
well as if the thing were done, though.”
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“How, brother?”
“Being bent upon it, you can dispose by will of anything you have
the misfortune to inherit in any way you like, you know.”
“That’s true!” says the trooper, pondering again. Then he
wistfully asks, with his hand on his brother’s, “Would you mind
mentioning that, brother, to your wife and family?”
“Not at all.”
“Thank you. You wouldn’t object to say, perhaps, that although
an undoubted vagabond, I am a vagabond of the harum-scarum or-
der, and not of the mean sort?”
The ironmaster, repressing his amused smile, assents.
“Thank you. Thank you. It’s a weight off my mind,” says the
trooper with a heave of his chest as he unfolds his arms and puts a
hand on each leg, “though I had set my heart on being scratched,
too!”
The brothers are very like each other, sitting face to face; but a
certain massive simplicity and absence of usage in the ways of the
world is all on the trooper’s side.
“Well,” he proceeds, throwing off his disappointment, “next
and last, those plans of mine. You have been so brotherly as to
propose to me to fall in here and take my place among the prod-
ucts of your perseverance and sense. I thank you heartily. It’s more
than brotherly, as I said before, and I thank you heartily for it,”
shaking him a long time by the hand. “But the truth is, brother, I
am a—I am a kind of a weed, and it’s too late to plant me in a
regular garden.”
“My dear George,” returns the elder, concentrating his strong steady
brow upon him and smiling confidently, “leave that to me, and let
me try.”
George shakes his head. “You could do it, I have not a doubt, if
anybody could; but it’s not to be done. Not to be done, sir! Whereas
it so falls out, on the other hand, that I am able to be of some trifle
of use to Sir Leicester Dedlock since his illness—brought on by fam-
ily sorrows—and that he would rather have that help from our
mother’s son than from anybody else.”
“Well, my dear George,” returns the other with a very slight shade
upon his open face, “if you prefer to serve in Sir Leicester Dedlock’s
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household brigade—”
“There it is, brother,” cries the trooper, checking him, with his
hand upon his knee again; “there it is! You don’t take kindly to that
idea; I don’t mind it. You are not used to being officered; I am. Ev-
erything about you is in perfect order and discipline; everything about
me requires to be kept so. We are not accustomed to carry things
with the same hand or to look at ‘em from the same point. I don’t
say much about my garrison manners because I found myself pretty
well at my ease last night, and they wouldn’t be noticed here, I dare
say, once and away. But I shall get on best at Chesney Wold, where
there’s more room for a weed than there is here; and the dear old lady
will be made happy besides. Therefore I accept of Sir Leicester
Dedlock’s proposals. When I come over next year to give away the
bride, or whenever I come, I shall have the sense to keep the house-
hold brigade in ambuscade and not to manoeuvre it on your ground.
I thank you heartily again and am proud to think of the Rouncewells
as they’ll be founded by you.”
“You know yourself, George,” says the elder brother, returning the
grip of his hand, “and perhaps you know me better than I know
myself. Take your way. So that we don’t quite lose one another again,
take your way.”
“No fear of that!” returns the trooper. “Now, before I turn my
horse’s head homewards, brother, I will ask you—if you’ll be so
good—to look over a letter for me. I brought it with me to send
from these parts, as Chesney Wold might be a painful name just now
to the person it’s written to. I am not much accustomed to corre-
spondence myself, and I am particular respecting this present letter
because I want it to be both straightforward and delicate.”
Herewith he hands a letter, closely written in somewhat pale ink
but in a neat round hand, to the ironmaster, who reads as follows:
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GEORGE
“A little formal,” observes the elder brother, refolding it with a
puzzled face.
“But nothing that might not be sent to a pattern young lady?” asks
the younger.
“Nothing at all.”
Therefore it is sealed and deposited for posting among the iron cor-
respondence of the day. This done, Mr. George takes a hearty farewell
of the family party and prepares to saddle and mount. His brother,
however, unwilling to part with him so soon, proposes to ride with
him in a light open carriage to the place where he will bait for the
night, and there remain with him until morning, a servant riding for
so much of the journey on the thoroughbred old grey from Chesney
Wold. The offer, being gladly accepted, is followed by a pleasant ride,
a pleasant dinner, and a pleasant breakfast, all in brotherly commun-
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ion. Then they once more shake hands long and heartily and part, the
ironmaster turning his face to the smoke and fires, and the trooper to
the green country. Early in the afternoon the subdued sound of his
heavy military trot is heard on the turf in the avenue as he rides on with
imaginary clank and jingle of accoutrements under the old elm-trees.
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CHAPTER LXIV
Esther’s Narrative
SOON AFTER I HAD THAT CONVERTION with my guardian, he put a
sealed paper in my hand one morning and said, “This is for next
month, my dear.” I found in it two hundred pounds.
I now began very quietly to make such preparations as I thought
were necessary. Regulating my purchases by my guardian’s taste, which
I knew very well of course, I arranged my wardrobe to please him
and hoped I should be highly successful. I did it all so quietly because
I was not quite free from my old apprehension that Ada would be
rather sorry and because my guardian was so quiet . I had no doubt
that under all the circumstances we should be married in the most
private and simple manner. Perhaps I should only have to say to Ada,
“Would you like to come and see me married to-morrow, my pet?”
Perhaps our wedding might even be as unpretending as her own, and
I might not find it necessary to say anything about it until it was
over. I thought that if I were to choose, I would like this best.
The only exception I made was Mrs. Woodcourt. I told her that I
was going to be married to my guardian and that we had been engaged
some time. She highly approved. She could never do enough for me
and was remarkably softened now in comparison with what she had
been when we first knew her. There was no trouble she would not have
taken to have been of use to me, but I need hardly say that I only
allowed her to take as little as gratified her kindness without tasking it.
Of course this was not a time to neglect my guardian, and of course
it was not a time for neglecting my darling. So I had plenty of occu-
pation, which I was glad of; and as to Charley, she was absolutely not
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myself, he has been doing some other great kindness. Not that it
required much penetration to say that, because I knew that his being
there at all was an act of kindness.
Supper was ready at the hotel, and when we were alone at table he
said, “Full of curiosity, no doubt, little woman, to know why I have
brought you here?”
“Well, guardian,” said I, “without thinking myself a Fatima or you
a Blue Beard, I am a little curious about it.”
“Then to ensure your night’s rest, my love,” he returned gaily, “I
won’t wait until to-morrow to tell you. I have very much wished to
express to Woodcourt, somehow, my sense of his humanity to poor
unfortunate Jo, his inestimable services to my young cousins, and his
value to us all. When it was decided that he should settle here, it
came into my head that I might ask his acceptance of some unpre-
tending and suitable little place to lay his own head in. I therefore
caused such a place to be looked out for, and such a place was found
on very easy terms, and I have been touching it up for him and mak-
ing it habitable. However, when I walked over it the day before yes-
terday and it was reported ready, I found that I was not housekeeper
enough to know whether things were all as they ought to be. So I
sent off for the best little housekeeper that could possibly be got to
come and give me her advice and opinion. And here she is,” said my
guardian, “laughing and crying both together!”
Because he was so dear, so good, so admirable. I tried to tell him
what I thought of him, but I could not articulate a word.
“Tut, tut!” said my guardian. “You make too much of it, little woman.
Why, how you sob, Dame Durden, how you sob!”
“It is with exquisite pleasure, guardian—with a heart full of thanks.”
“Well, well,” said he. “I am delighted that you approve. I thought
you would. I meant it as a pleasant surprise for the little mistress of
Bleak House.”
I kissed him and dried my eyes. “I know now!” said I. “I have seen
this in your face a long while.”
“No; have you really, my dear?” said he. “What a Dame Durden it
is to read a face!”
He was so quaintly cheerful that I could not long be otherwise, and
was almost ashamed of having been otherwise at all. When I went to
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bed, I cried. I am bound to confess that I cried; but I hope it was with
pleasure, though I am not quite sure it was with pleasure. I repeated every
word of the letter twice over.
A most beautiful summer morning succeeded, and after breakfast
we went out arm in arm to see the house of which I was to give my
mighty housekeeping opinion. We entered a flower-garden by a gate
in a side wall, of which he had the key, and the first thing I saw was
that the beds and flowers were all laid out according to the manner
of my beds and flowers at home.
“You see, my dear,” observed my guardian, standing still with a
delighted face to watch my looks, “knowing there could be no better
plan, I borrowed yours.”
We went on by a pretty little orchard, where the cherries were nest-
ling among the green leaves and the shadows of the apple-trees were
sporting on the grass, to the house itself—a cottage, quite a rustic cot-
tage of doll’s rooms; but such a lovely place, so tranquil and so beauti-
ful, with such a rich and smiling country spread around it; with water
sparkling away into the distance, here all overhung with summer-growth,
there turning a humming mill; at its nearest point glancing through a
meadow by the cheerful town, where cricket-players were assembling
in bright groups and a flag was flying from a white tent that rippled in
the sweet west wind. And still, as we went through the pretty rooms,
out at the little rustic verandah doors, and underneath the tiny wooden
colonnades garlanded with woodbine, jasmine, and honey-suckle, I
saw in the papering on the walls, in the colours of the furniture, in the
arrangement of all the pretty objects, my little tastes and fancies, my
little methods and inventions which they used to laugh at while they
praised them, my odd ways everywhere.
I could not say enough in admiration of what was all so beautiful,
but one secret doubt arose in my mind when I saw this, I thought,
oh, would he be the happier for it! Would it not have been better for
his peace that I should not have been so brought before him? Because
although I was not what he thought me, still he loved me very dearly,
and it might remind him mournfully of what be believed he had
lost. I did not wish him to forget me—perhaps he might not
have done so, without these aids to his memory—but my way was
easier than his, and I could have reconciled myself even to that so
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When we came home we found that a young man had called three
times in the course of that one day to see me and that having been
told on the occasion of his third call that I was not expected to return
before ten o’clock at night, he had left word that he would call about
then. He had left his card three times. Mr. Guppy.
As I naturally speculated on the object of these visits, and as I
always associated something ludicrous with the visitor, it fell out
that in laughing about Mr. Guppy I told my guardian of his old
proposal and his subsequent retraction. “After that,” said my guard-
ian, “we will certainly receive this hero.” So instructions were given
that Mr. Guppy should be shown in when he came again, and they
were scarcely given when he did come again.
He was embarrassed when he found my guardian with me, but
recovered himself and said, “How de do, sir?”
“How do you do, sir?” returned my guardian.
“Thank you, sir, I am tolerable,” returned Mr. Guppy. “Will you
allow me to introduce my mother, Mrs. Guppy of the Old Street
Road, and my particular friend, Mr. Weevle. That is to say, my friend
has gone by the name of Weevle, but his name is really and truly
Jobling.”
My guardian begged them to be seated, and they all sat down.
“Tony,” said Mr. Guppy to his friend after an awkward silence.
“Will you open the case?”
“Do it yourself,” returned the friend rather tartly.
“Well, Mr. Jarndyce, sir,” Mr. Guppy, after a moment’s consider-
ation, began, to the great diversion of his mother, which she dis-
played by nudging Mr. Jobling with her elbow and winking at me in
a most remarkable manner, “I had an idea that I should see Miss
Summerson by herself and was not quite prepared for your esteemed
presence. But Miss Summerson has mentioned to you, perhaps, that
something has passed between us on former occasions?”
“Miss Summerson,” returned my guardian, smiling, “has made a
communication to that effect to me.”
“That,” said Mr. Guppy, “makes matters easier. Sir, I have come out
of my articles at Kenge and Carboy’s, and I believe with satisfaction to
all parties. I am now admitted (after undergoing an examination that’s
enough to badger a man blue, touching a pack of nonsense that he
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don’t want to know) on the roll of attorneys and have taken out my
certificate, if it would be any satisfaction to you to see it.”
“Thank you, Mr. Guppy,” returned my guardian. “I am quite will-
ing—I believe I use a legal phrase—to admit the certificate.”
Mr. Guppy therefore desisted from taking something out of his
pocket and proceeded without it.
I have no capital myself, but my mother has a little property which
takes the form of an annuity”—here Mr. Guppy’s mother rolled her
head as if she never could sufficiently enjoy the observation, and put
her handkerchief to her mouth, and again winked at me—”and a few
pounds for expenses out of pocket in conducting business will never
be wanting, free of interest, which is an advantage, you know,” said
Mr. Guppy feelingly.
“Certainly an advantage,” returned my guardian.
“I have some connexion,” pursued Mr. Guppy, “and it lays in the
direction of Walcot Square, Lambeth. I have therefore taken a ‘ouse
in that locality, which, in the opinion of my friends, is a hollow
bargain (taxes ridiculous, and use of fixtures included in the rent),
and intend setting up professionally for myself there forthwith.”
Here Mr. Guppy’s mother fell into an extraordinary passion of
rolling her head and smiling waggishly at anybody who would look
at her.
“It’s a six-roomer, exclusive of kitchens,” said Mr. Guppy, “and in
the opinion of my friends, a commodious tenement. When I men-
tion my friends, I refer principally to my friend Jobling, who I be-
lieve has known me,” Mr. Guppy looked at him with a sentimental
air, “from boyhood’s hour.”
Mr. Jobling confirmed this with a sliding movement of his legs.
“My friend Jobling will render me his assistance in the capacity
of clerk and will live in the ‘ouse,” said Mr. Guppy. “My mother
will likewise live in the ‘ouse when her present quarter in the Old
Street Road shall have ceased and expired; and consequently there
will be no want of society. My friend Jobling is naturally aristo-
cratic by taste, and besides being acquainted with the movements
of the upper circles, fully backs me in the intentions I am now
developing.”
Mr. Jobling said “Certainly” and withdrew a little from the elbow
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of Mr Guppy’s mother.
“Now, I have no occasion to mention to you, sir, you being in the
confidence of Miss Summerson,” said Mr. Guppy, “(mother, I wish
you’d be so good as to keep still), that Miss Summerson’s image was
formerly imprinted on my ‘eart and that I made her a proposal of
marriage.”
“That I have heard,” returned my guardian.
“Circumstances,” pursued Mr. Guppy, “over which I had no con-
trol, but quite the contrary, weakened the impression of that image
for a time. At which time Miss Summerson’s conduct was highly
genteel; I may even add, magnanimous.”
My guardian patted me on the shoulder and seemed much amused.
“Now, sir,” said Mr. Guppy, “I have got into that state of mind myself
that I wish for a reciprocity of magnanimous behaviour. I wish to prove to
Miss Summerson that I can rise to a heighth of which perhaps she hardly
thought me capable. I find that the image which I did suppose had been
eradicated from my ‘eart is not eradicated. Its influence over me is still
tremenjous, and yielding to it, I am willing to overlook the circumstances
over which none of us have had any control and to renew those proposals
to Miss Summerson which I had the honour to make at a former period.
I beg to lay the ‘ouse in Walcot Square, the business, and myself before
Miss Summerson for her acceptance.”
“Very magnanimous indeed, sir,” observed my guardian.
“Well, sir,” replied Mr. Guppy with candour, “my wish is to be
magnanimous. I do not consider that in making this offer to Miss
Summerson I am by any means throwing myself away; neither is
that the opinion of my friends. Still, there are circumstances which I
submit may be taken into account as a set off against any little draw-
backs of mine, and so a fair and equitable balance arrived at.”
“I take upon myself, sir,” said my guardian, laughing as he rang the
bell, “to reply to your proposals on behalf of Miss Summerson. She
is very sensible of your handsome intentions, and wishes you good
evening, and wishes you well.”
“Oh!” said Mr. Guppy with a blank look. “Is that tantamount, sir,
to acceptance, or rejection, or consideration?”
“To decided rejection, if you please,” returned my guardian.
Mr. Guppy looked incredulously at his friend, and at his mother,
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who suddenly turned very angry, and at the floor, and at the ceiling.
“Indeed?” said he. “Then, Jobling, if you was the friend you repre-
sent yourself, I should think you might hand my mother out of the
gangway instead of allowing her to remain where she ain’t wanted.”
But Mrs. Guppy positively refused to come out of the gangway. She
wouldn’t hear of it. “Why, get along with you,” said she to my guardian,
“what do you mean? Ain’t my son good enough for you? You ought to be
ashamed of yourself. Get out with you!”
“My good lady,” returned my guardian, “it is hardly reasonable to
ask me to get out of my own room.”
“I don’t care for that,” said Mrs. Guppy. “Get out with you. If we
ain’t good enough for you, go and procure somebody that is good
enough. Go along and find ‘em.”
I was quite unprepared for the rapid manner in which Mrs. Guppy’s
power of jocularity merged into a power of taking the profoundest
offence.
“Go along and find somebody that’s good enough for you,” re-
peated Mrs. Guppy. “Get out!” Nothing seemed to astonish Mr.
Guppy’s mother so much and to make her so very indignant as our
not getting out. “Why don’t you get out?” said Mrs. Guppy. “What
are you stopping here for?”
“Mother,” interposed her son, always getting before her and push-
ing her back with one shoulder as she sidled at my guardian, “will
you hold your tongue?”
“No, William,” she returned, “I won’t! Not unless he gets out, I
won’t!”
However, Mr. Guppy and Mr. Jobling together closed on Mr.
Guppy’s mother (who began to be quite abusive) and took her, very
much against her will, downstairs, her voice rising a stair higher every
time her figure got a stair lower, and insisting that we should imme-
diately go and find somebody who was good enough for us, and
above all things that we should get out.
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CHAPTER LXV
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me all kinds of precious names, and telling Allan I had done I don’t
know what for her, that I was just obliged to get into the little car-
riage and caln her down by letting her say and do exactly what she
liked. Allan, standing at the window, was as pleased as Caddy; and I
was as pleased as either of them; and I wonder that I got away as I
did, rather than that I came off laughing, and red, and anything but
tidy, and looking after Caddy, who looked after us out of the coach-
window as long as she could see us.
This made us some quarter of an hour late, and when we came to
Westminster Hall we found that the day’s business was begun. Worse
than that, we found such an unusual crowd in the Court of Chan-
cery that it was full to the door, and we could neither see nor hear
what was passing within. It appeared to be something droll, for occa-
sionally there was a laugh and a cry of “Silence!” It appeared to be
something interesting, for every one was pushing and striving to get
nearer. It appeared to be something that made the professional gentle-
men very merry, for there were several young counsellors in wigs and
whiskers on the outside of the crowd, and when one of them told
the others about it, they put their hands in their pockets, and quite
doubled themselves up with laughter, and went stamping about the
pavement of the Hall.
We asked a gentleman by us if he knew what cause was on. He told
us Jarndyce and Jarndyce. We asked him if he knew what was doing in
it. He said really, no he did not, nobody ever did, but as well as he
could make out, it was over. Over for the day? we asked him. No, he
said, over for good.
Over for good!
When we heard this unaccountable answer, we looked at one an-
other quite lost in amazement. Could it be possible that the will had
set things right at last and that Richard and Ada were going to be
rich? It seemed too good to be true. Alas it was!
Our suspense was short, for a break-up soon took place in the
crowd, and the people came streaming out looking flushed and hot
and bringing a quantity of bad air with them. Still they were all
exceedingly amused and were more like people coming out from a
farce or a juggler than from a court of justice. We stood aside, watch-
ing for any countenance we knew, and presently great bundles of
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charge you gave me. Go home with this intelligence and come to
Ada’s by and by!”
I would not let him take me to a coach, but entreated him to go to
Richard without a moment’s delay and leave me to do as he wished.
Hurrying home, I found my guardian and told him gradually with
what news I had returned. “Little woman,” said he, quite unmoved
for himself, “to have done with the suit on any terms is a greater
blessing than I had looked for. But my poor young cousins!”
We talked about them all the morning and discussed what it was
possible to do. In the afternoon my guardian walked with me to
Symond’s Inn and left me at the door. I went upstairs. When my
darling heard my footsteps, she came out into the small passage and
threw her arms round my neck, but she composed herself direcfly
and said that Richard had asked for me several times. Allan had found
him sitting in the corner of the court, she told me, like a stone figure.
On being roused, he had broken away and made as if he would have
spoken in a fierce voice to the judge. He was stopped by his mouth
being full of blood, and Allan had brought him home.
He was lying on a sofa with his eyes closed when I went in. There
were restoratives on the table; the room was made as airy as possible,
and was darkened, and was very orderly and quiet. Allan stood be-
hind him watching him gravely. His face appeared to me to be quite
destitute of colour, and now that I saw him without his seeing me, I
fully saw, for the first time, how worn away he was. But he looked
handsomer than I had seen him look for many a day.
I sat down by his side in silence. Opening his eyes by and by, he
said in a weak voice, but with his old smile, “Dame Durden, kiss me,
my dear!”
It was a great comfort and surprise to me to find him in his low
state cheerful and looking forward. He was happier, he said, in our
intended marriage than he could find words to tell me. My husband
had been a guardian angel to him and Ada, and he blessed us both
and wished us all the joy that life could yield us. I almost felt as if my
own heart would have broken when I saw him take my husband’s
hand and hold it to his breast.
We spoke of the future as much as possible, and he said several
times that he must be present at our marriage if he could stand upon
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his feet. Ada would contrive to take him, somehow, he said. “Yes,
surely, dearest Richard!” But as my darling answered him thus hope-
fully, so serene and beautiful, with the help that was to come to her
so near—I knew—I knew!
It was not good for him to talk too much, and when he was silent,
we were silent too. Sitting beside him, I made a pretence of working
for my dear, as he had always been used to joke about my being busy.
Ada leaned upon his pillow, holding his head upon her arm. He
dozed often, and whenever he awoke without seeing him, said first
of all, “Where is Woodcourt?”
Evening had come on when I lifted up my eyes and saw my guard-
ian standing in the little hall. “Who is that, Dame Durden?” Richard
asked me. The door was behind him, but he had observed in my face
that some one was there.
I looked to Allan for advice, and as he nodded “Yes,” bent over
Richard and told him. My guardian saw what passed, came softly by
me in a moment, and laid his hand on Richard’s. “Oh, sir,” said
Richard, “you are a good man, you are a good man!” and burst into
tears for the first time.
My guardian, the picture of a good man, sat down in my place,
keeping his hand on Richard’s.
“My dear Rick,” said he, “the clouds have cleared away, and it is
bright now. We can see now. We were all bewildered, Rick, more or
less. What matters! And how are you, my dear boy?”
“I am very weak, sir, but I hope I shall be stronger. I have to begin
the world.”
“Aye, truly; well said!” cried my guardian.
“I will not begin it in the old way now,” said Richard with a sad
smile. “I have learned a lesson now, sir. It was a hard one, but you
shall be assured, indeed, that I have learned it.”
“Well, well,” said my guardian, comforting him; “well, well, well,
dear boy!”
“I was thinking, sir,” resumed Richard, “that there is nothing on earth
I should so much like to see as their house—Dame Durden’s and
Woodcourt’s house. If I could be removed there when I begin to recover
my strength, I feel as if I should get well there sooner than anywhere.”
“Why, so have I been thinking too, Rick,” said my guardian, “and
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our little woman likewise; she and I have been talking of it this very
day. I dare say her husband won’t object. What do you think?”
Richard smiled and lifted up his arm to touch him as he stood
behind the head of the couch.
“I say nothing of Ada,” said Richard, “but I think of her, and have
thought of her very much. Look at her! See her here, sir, bending
over this pillow when she has so much need to rest upon it herself,
my dear love, my poor girl!”
He clasped her in his arms, and none of us spoke. He gradually
released her, and she looked upon us, and looked up to heaven, and
moved her lips.
“When I get down to Bleak House,” said Richard, “I shall have
much to tell you, sir, and you will have much to show me. You will
go, won’t you?”
“Undoubtedly, dear Rick.”
“Thank you; like you, like you,” said Richard. “But it’s all like
you. They have been telling me how you planned it and how you
remembered all Esther’s familiar tastes and ways. It will be like
coming to the old Bleak House again.”
“And you will come there too, I hope, Rick. I am a solitary man
now, you know, and it will be a charity to come to me. A charity to
come to me, my love!” he repeated to Ada as he gently passed his
hand over her golden hair and put a lock of it to his lips. (I think he
vowed within himself to cherish her if she were left alone.)
“It was a troubled dream?” said Richard, clasping both my
guardian’s hands eagerly.
“Nothing more, Rick; nothing more.”
“And you, being a good man, can pass it as such, and forgive and
pity the dreamer, and be lenient and encouraging when he wakes?”
“Indeed I can. What am I but another dreamer, Rick?”
“I will begin the world!” said Richard with a light in his eyes.
My husband drew a little nearer towards Ada, and I saw him sol-
emnly lift up his hand to warn my guardian.
“When shall I go from this place to that pleasant country where
the old times are, where I shall have strength to tell what Ada has
been to me, where I shall be able to recall my many faults and
blindnesses, where I shall prepare myself to be a guide to my unborn
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CHAPTER LXVI
Down in Lincolnshire
THERE IS A HUSH upon Chesney Wold in these altered days, as there is
upon a portion of the family history. The story goes that Sir Leices-
ter paid some who could have spoken out to hold their peace; but it
is a lame story, feebly whispering and creeping about, and any brighter
spark of life it shows soon dies away. It is known for certain that the
handsome Lady Dedlock lies in the mausoleum in the park, where
the trees arch darkly overhead, and the owl is heard at night making
the woods ring; but whence she was brought home to be laid among
the echoes of that solitary place, or how she
died, is all mystery. Some of her old friends, principally to be found
among the peachy-cheeked charmers with the skeleton throats, did
once occasionally say, as they toyed in a ghastly manner with large
fans—like charmers reduced to flirting with grim death, after losing
all their other beaux—did once occasionally say, when the world
assembled together, that they wondered the ashes of the Dedlocks,
entombed in the mausoleum, never rose against the profanation of
her company. But the dead-and-gone Dedlocks take it very calmly
and have never been known to object.
Up from among the fern in the hollow, and winding by the bridle-
road among the trees, comes sometimes to this lonely spot the sound
of horses’ hoofs. Then may be seen Sir Leicester—invalided, bent,
and almost blind, but of worthy presence yet—riding with a stalwart
man beside him, constant to his bridle-rein. When they come to a
certain spot before the mausoleum-door, Sir Leicester’s accustomed
horse stops of his own accord, and Sir Leicester, pulling off his hat, is
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them. They have visitors in the high summer weather, when a grey
cloak and umbrella, unknown to Chesney Wold at other periods, are
seen among the leaves; when two young ladies are occasionally found
gambolling in sequestered saw-pits and such nooks of the park; and
when the smoke of two pipes wreathes away into the fragrant evening
air from the trooper’s door. Then is a fife heard trolling within the
lodge on the inspiring topic of the “British Grenadiers”; and as the
evening closes in, a gruff inflexible voice is heard to say, while two
men pace together up and down, “But I never own to it before the
old girl. Discipline must be maintained.”
The greater part of the house is shut up, and it is a show-house no
longer; yet Sir Leicester holds his shrunken state in the long drawing-
room for all that, and reposes in his old place before my Lady’s pic-
ture. Closed in by night with broad screens, and illumined only in
that part, the light of the drawing-room seems gradually contracting
and dwindling until it shall be no more. A little more, in truth, and
it will be all extinguished for Sir Leicester; and the damp door in the
mausoleum which shuts so tight, and looks so obdurate, will have
opened and received him.
Volumnia, growing with the flight of time pinker as to the red in
her face, and yellower as to the white, reads to Sir Leicester in the
long evenings and is driven to various artifices to conceal her yawns,
of which the chief and most efficacious is the insertion of the pearl
necklace between her rosy lips. Long-winded treatises on the Buffy
and Boodle question, showing how Buffy is immaculate and Boodle
villainous, and how the country is lost by being all Boodle and no
Buffy, or saved by being all Buffy and no Boodle (it must be one of
the two, and cannot be anything else), are the staple of her reading.
Sir Leicester is not particular what it is and does not appear to follow
it very closely, further than that he always comes broad awake the
moment Volumnia ventures to leave off, and sonorously repeating
her last words, begs with some displeasure to know if she finds her-
self fatigued. However, Volumnia, in the course of her bird-like hop-
ping about and pecking at papers, has alighted on a memorandum
concerning herself in the event of “anything happening” to her kins-
man, which is handsome compensation for an extensive course of
reading and holds even the dragon Boredom at bay.
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The cousins generally are rather shy of Chesney Wold in its dull-
ness, but take to it a little in the shooting season, when guns are
heard in the plantations, and a few scattered beaters and keepers wait
at the old places of appointment for low-spirited twos and threes of
cousins. The debilitated cousin, more debilitated by the dreariness of
the place, gets into a fearful state of depression, groaning under peni-
tential sofa-pillows in his gunless hours and protesting that such fernal
old jail’s—nough t’sew fler up—frever.
The only great occasions for Volumnia in this changed aspect of
the place in Lincolnshire are those occasions, rare and widely sepa-
rated, when something is to be done for the county or the country in
the way of gracing a public ball. Then, indeed, does the tuckered
sylph come out in fairy form and proceed with joy under cousinly
escort to the exhausted old assembly-room, fourteen heavy miles
off, which, during three hundred and sixty-four days and nights of
every ordinary year, is a kind of antipodean lumber-room full of old
chairs and tables upside down. Then, indeed, does she captivate all
hearts by her condescension, by her girlish vivacity, and by her skip-
ping about as in the days when the hideous old general with the
mouth too full of teeth had not cut one of them at two guineas each.
Then does she twirl and twine, a pastoral nymph of good family,
through the mazes of the dance. Then do the swains appear with tea,
with lemonade, with sandwiches, with homage. Then is she kind
and cruel, stately and unassuming, various, beautifully wilful. Then
is there a singular kind of parallel between her and the little glass
chandeliers of another age embellishing that assembly-room, which,
with their meagre stems, their spare little drops, their disappointing
knobs where no drops are, their bare little stalks from which knobs
and drops have both departed, and their little feeble prismatic twin-
kling, all seem Volumnias.
For the rest, Lincolnshire life to Volumnia is a vast blank of over-
grown house looking out upon trees, sighing, wringing their hands,
bowing their heads, and casting their tears upon the window-panes
in monotonous depressions. A labyrinth of grandeur, less the prop-
erty of an old family of human beings and their ghostly likenesses
than of an old family of echoings and thunderings which start out of
their hundred graves at every sound and go resounding through the
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CHAPTER LXVII
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be guardian now. He was her guardian henceforth, and the boy’s; and
he had an old association with the name. So she called him guardian,
and has called him guardian ever since. The children know him by
no other name. I say the children; I have two little daughters.
It is difficult to believe that Charley (round-eyed still, and not at
all grammatical) is married to a miller in our neighbourhood; yet so
it is; and even now, looking up from my desk as I write early in the
morning at my summer window, I see the very mill beginning to go
round. I hope the miller will not spoil Charley; but he is very fond of
her, and Charley is rather vain of such a match, for he is well to do
and was in great request. So far as my small maid is concerned, I
might suppose time to have stood for seven years as still as the mill
did half an hour ago, since little Emma, Charley’s sister, is exactly
what Charley used to be. As to Tom, Charley’s brother, I am really
afraid to say what he did at school in ciphering, but I think it was
decimals. He is apprenticed to the miller, whatever it was, and is a
good bashful fellow, always falling in love with somebody and being
ashamed of it.
Caddy Jellyby passed her very last holidays with us and was a dearer
creature than ever, perpetually dancing in and out of the house with
the children as if she had never given a dancing-lesson in her life. Caddy
keeps her own little carriage now instead of hiring one, and lives full
two miles further westward than Newman Street. She works very hard,
her husband (an excellent one) being lame and able to do very little.
Still, she is more than contented and does all she has to do with all her
heart. Mr. Jellyby spends his evenings at her new house with his head
against the wall as he used to do in her old one. I have heard that Mrs.
Jellyby was understood to suffer great mortification from her daughter’s
ignoble marriage and pursuits, but I hope she got over it in time. She
has been disappointed in Borrioboola-Gha, which turned out a failure
in consequence of the king of Boorioboola wanting to sell everybody—
who survived the climate—for rum, but she has taken up with the
rights of women to sit in Parliament, and Caddy tells me it is a mission
involving more correspondence than the old one. I had almost forgot-
ten Caddy’s poor little girl. She is not such a mite now, but she is deaf
and dumb. I believe there never was a better mother than Caddy, who
learns, in her scanty intervals of leisure, innumerable deaf and dumb
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907
Bleak House
I call him my Richard! But he says that he has two mamas, and I
am one.
We are not rich in the bank, but we have always prospered, and we
have quite enough. I never walk out with my husband but I hear the
people bless him. I never go into a house of any degree but I hear his
praises or see them in grateful eyes. I never lie down at night but I
know that in the course of that day he has alleviated pain and soothed
some fellow-creature in the time of need. I know that from the beds
of those who were past recovery, thanks have often, often gone up,
in the last hour, for his patient ministration. Is not this to be rich?
The people even praise me as the doctor’s wife. The people even
like me as I go about, and make so much of me that I am quite
abashed. I owe it all to him, my love, my pride! They like me for his
sake, as I do everything I do in life for his sake.
A night or two ago, after bustling about preparing for my darling
and my guardian and little Richard, who are coming to-morrow, I
was sitting out in the porch of all places, that dearly memorable
porch, when Allan came home. So he said, “My precious little woman,
what are you doing here?” And I said, “The moon is shining so
brightly, Allan, and the night is so delicious, that I have been sitting
here thinking.”
“What have you been thinking about, my dear?” said Allan then.
“How curious you are!” said I. “I am almost ashamed to tell you,
but I will. I have been thinking about my old looks—such as they
were.”
“And what have you been thinking about them, my busy bee?”
said Allan.
“I have been thinking that I thought it was impossible that you
could have loved me any better, even if I had retained them.”
“‘Such as they were’?” said Allan, laughing.
“Such as they were, of course.”
“My dear Dame Durden,” said Allan, drawing my arm through
his, “do you ever look in the glass?”
“You know I do; you see me do it.”
“And don’t you know that you are prettier than you ever were?”
“I did not know that; I am not certain that I know it now. But I
know that my dearest little pets are very pretty, and that my darling
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FINIS
909